Some of you may have wondered why the big deal in this class with the web (blogs, wikis, etc.). Part of it is that I feel it is very important for students to be public about their work. Written reports that go straight to the teacher and nobody else serves nobody. If we're going to put the work into learning something, shouldn't that knowledge be shared with as many people as possible?

But that's only part of it. I also feel that the more students must show their work publicly, the better that work will be. As David Wiley said recently at the AECT conference I attended, "open peer review always improves quality IF you actually care what other people think about you." There's some healthy debate at Dave's blog about whether this is true, so read it if you are interested. I, for one, agree with this statement and feel that it is usually (maybe not always) true. I know I have been much more careful and thoughtful about what I put on my blog since I learned several of my peers and others are reading it.

This is partly the purpose for blogs and wikis - free publishing! Students can publish their thoughts and feedback in a public arena. Will Richardson had a thought recently about this that every technology tool should have a publish feature. Wouldn't that be cool if a student could make an iMovie, and then publish it to the web? Or make an Excel spreadsheet, or Publisher document, or Photoshop file, or ANYTHING and then publish to the web and all of our aggregators would notify us that this student has something new for us to look at, and we can all look at it and learn, and then we could give feedback, and we'd all be better because of this exchange ...

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I do think it'd be cool!