This morning, I got very excited. “Charlottesville schools are setting up a private wiki and training teachers to use them” it said on cvillenews.com. I asked myself questions like, “Why didn’t I know about this?” “Are teachers are CHS involved?” and “How many times are the teachers going to screw it up?”

Though in all honestly, it’s a brilliant idea. Multiple teachers can make changes to one lesson plan with automatic distribution, even if none of them understand the first thing about networking or the internet. Teachers at CHS have slowly been adopting the internet as a new frontier for the classroom in the past years. Several of my teachers have utilized blogs to post homework updates and even allow for students to comment and critique each others’ writing work. Individual teacher websites have been around for even longer. But this - now this is something truly innovational.

“But wait,” I paused while reading the Daily Progress article. It says here that “department heads must approve any edits that are made.”

Well, so much for that idea. I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible idea. Everyone loves wikipedia, and that’s edited by everyone. Can the Charlottesville City School system not trust it’s teachers enough to let them edit their own private wiki? With this system in place, it will take days for updates to appear online, and that’s assuming that the department heads actually have enough free time to approve these changes a few times a week.

This is just another example of the technologically-illiterate adopting an idea before they understand why the idea worked in the first place.

Your thoughts?

well, isn’t that the same as not allowing anonymous comments on your blog? wouldn’t you want other teachers to keep an eye on these lesson plans before they’re posted?

The only difference is that CCS teachers are the only ones allowed to change the articles in the first place. You can bet that the teachers aren’t going to spam or vandalize any of the pages.