Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Accolades for Flat Classroom Projects

Congratulations to all contributors of the Flat Classroom Project 2008 wiki and a big thank you to all voters in the Edublog Awards 2008! We are delighted to announce that once again (we were winners in 2006 and nominated in 2007) the Flat Classroom Project has been acknowledged as the winner for Best Educational Wiki!

The other nominees for best educational wiki also deserve special recognition:
eToolBox
The 2008 Comment Challenge
Kidpedia
Educational Origami
WikiEducator
S.D.Public School, Pitampura
Learning in Maine
Digitally Speaking
Clif’s Wiki
Miss Baker’s Biology Class
F-ALT
Salks Periodic Table
School AUP 2.0
Useful Wiki
Digital Media Across Asia

Why is Flat Classroom Project 2008 wiki an example of a 'best educational wiki'?
In the absence of actual criteria for the award, let me summarise what I think are the key features of this wiki that allow it to stand out amongst its peers.
  • It uses the wiki format as a pedagogical platform and shares educational resources used during the project
  • It provides a launching place for teachers and students internationally to connect and collaborate
  • It is an excellent 'receptacle' for multimedia, with contributors able to upload and share a variety of artifacts
  • It shares ALL aspects of the Flat Classroom Project and documents each individual contribution
  • It provides, displays, and documents all interactions - in particular the 'history' editing tabs and the 'discussion' tabs for each wiki page show a rich involvement by teachers and students
  • It shows that meaningful global collaboration using Web 2.0 is possible, relevant and exciting
Accolades also go to Flat Classroom Projects co-founder Vicki Davis for winning Best Teacher Blog for Cool Cat Teacher. A truly well-deserved award! We are so proud of you Vicki! Keep doing what you are doing, and don't let the sidelines get you down!

I also need to mention in this post about our Horizon Project and its inclusion in Don Tapscott's latest book, "Grown Up Digital". You can read this book online, and if you go to page 138 you will find Don mentions our Horizon Project. Don, also the author of "Wikinomics', was our keynote speaker for the Horizon Project 2008. It is a great honour to be included in the new book, however some of the facts about our Horizon Project are a little jumbled. It would have been good to review this before the book was published in order to get it right, as we did with our feature in Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat, where we actually collaborated with Tom on the 2 and a bit pages and made sure the facts were straight. Anyway, to set the record straight, we never collaborated with a classroom in Darfur, and the Horizon Projects, both 2007 and 2008, are based on the Horizon Report which annually highlights emerging technologies in education (released by the New Media Consortium and Educause). However, I do look forward to reading all of "Grown Up Digital" when my copy arrives here in Doha.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations Julie (and Vicki) on this well deserved award. A great reflection too on why it works so well.

Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher said...

Thank you Julie - you are amazing and I appreciate your friendship and inspiration. You are my educational hero!

Unknown said...

This is great! Congrats!