Wiki's are very interesting. I have used Wikipedia to help point me in the right direction on some of my papers in college, but I did not use it as a source. I used it to find more information than I knew on a subject, but I never trusted it. I was never sure who was writing the article and whether or not I could trust it. Just as I tell my students after they tell me Joe helped me get the wrong answer, "you need to check your sources". I did find a few of wikis that caught my eye. Ms. Schmitz seems to have it all set on her wiki. She has homework listed, homework answers, links to activities, and many other things she uses in her Honors Geometry class. There was also a site, which I can't relocate at the moment, that was started by some math teachers and they were sharing worksheets. I can see why the worksheet sharing would be a wiki, but I wonder why Ms Schmitz uses a wiki and not a web page? She would not allow her students to alter most of the documents and pages on her site. I wonder if it is easier for her to maintain a wiki compared to a web page?
I can see many different possibilities for collaboration between classrooms world wide using wikis. The problems are many and I think they maybe worth the fight if we use them properly. If we use them to introduce children to each other in a world wide setting them it may help raise tolerance amongst the adults of the future. The project possibilities are almost endless. You could compare and contrast climates, histories, stats (student driven surveys), science projects in different locations, and so on. The problems include access to all students, organizing collaborations, setting up projects, introducing teachers to each other, and monitoring input are just a few of the problems that could occur while using wikis.
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