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Thu Apr 8 12:16:43 EDT 2010

extensively in schools serving non-poor students, suggesting, somewhat
counter-intuitively, that adding free tools to the schooling ecosystem
can exacerbate inequities in educational opportunities. In this
presentation, we present both statistical evidence of inequalities in
wiki usage across schools serving different populations and qualitative
evidence suggesting that these gaps can be ameliorated by helping all
schools develop a cycle of experiment and experience with emerging
technologies.

-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at mit.edu
http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto

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      <th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">Date: </th>
      <td>Thu, 8 Apr 2010 12:47:34 -0400</td>
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      <th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">From: </th>
      <td>Benj. Mako Hill <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:mako at MIT.EDU">&lt;mako at MIT.EDU&gt;</a></td>
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<br>
<pre>I'm going to be serving as a discussant for this talk today. I've read
the draft of the paper presenting this work and it's both good and
relevant to a lot of the work folks at the center are doing. If you can
make it, you should!

Later,
Mako

Talk Details
-------------

  *Will Free Web 2.0 Tools and Resources Exacerbate Educational
  Inequities? A Mixed-Methods Study of K-12 Wiki Learning Environments*

  *April 8 2:30PM-3:45PM Eliot Lyman Room, Longfellow Hall, Harvard
  Graduate School of Education*

The Web 2.0 revolution has vastly simplified the process of adding
content to the World Wide Web, and this technological revolution has
provoked profound changes in business, journalism, politics, civics, and
even our sense of identity. The Open Education movement seeks to use Web
2.0 technologies to provoke similarly dramatic changes in education. In
particular, Open Education leaders hope that free tools and resources
like Moodle and Open Courseware will promote student-centered
instruction in diverse learning environments.

The Digital Collaborative Learning Communities project (PIs: Richard
Murnane and John Willett) seeks to investigate these issues of
excellence and equity in the use of Web 2.0 tools in K-12 learning
environments, and we have begun our research by looking at the use of
wikis. Our initial studies have involved longitudinal analysis drawing
from 179,853 educational wikis hosted by PBworks.com, as well as over 50
interviews with wiki-using teachers, 35 student focus groups, and
observations in 12 schools in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
Virginia, Georgia, and California. 