InSITE: Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki

Sumonta Kasemvilas had a talk about Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki. Earlier attempts at using Wikis in higher education have made apparent that there are some challenges. For instance, only using watchlists to keep track of changes has turned out not to be sufficient, students feel that the wiki is not easy to navigate and an overall “summary table” of what is going on is missing. Her efforts to enhance MediaWiki to make it better suited for higher education seems promising.

Wikis in teacher education

In one project, I will try to develop a wiki for students in teacher education, which should function as a “Wikipedia” for teacher education. By that, I mean that the articles should be within the context of teacher education. For instance, an article on multiplication would not only say what multiplication is or how it is done, but also include examples of pupils’ misconceptions, ideas of teaching materials and so on.

The wiki ("eleviki"), is currently on a very early stage, but I hope to start using it with students in August.

A lot more could be said on this and my other main interests, but this should suffice for now.

Four main areas

In this blog, I will write about anything connected to my work, but it will tend to include more about my main research interests, which are:
1) History of mathematics in mathematics education
2) Gay issues in teacher education
3) ICT in mathematics education
4) Wikis in teacher education

To get this blog started, I will, in the days to come, write short posts on these four topics to introduce them.