Ed. research to use to justify premium wiki expense

First, I use the pbwiki for assignments not only for the class but also for Honors Students to run a research project and put their finished research or project on the pbwiki.  Here is one of them from my http://www.pcwrgeography.pbwiki.com  site for San Diego City College.  It's got the Honors Student project that is a wallet sized sheet for earthquake preparedness, but it really is good for any emergency.  The maps make it specific to San Diego, but it can be adapted for any area.  I wrote for and received a grant for this, and will be asking for additional grant monies this year. 

For a grant, perhaps to expand the Honors program.  Or, if you are in either Math or English, get a grant to create a wiki catch up class.  At SD City College we have these catch up classes that are 1 unit, and you sign up for a year's access to the class.  When you get to a point in the Math Class where you are having trouble, there is a series of videos and sample problems to help you understand the directions and principles.  For English, there are sections to help ESL students by putting them in touch with tutors in their own language; tutors who may or may not even live in the area, but because of the web they are able to help the students learn and study more effectively in English.

As a geography teacher, I put .kml files in Google Earth on my pbwiki site for exams, and change those questions for the exams simply by changing the point locations.  That way, no one has the opportunity to cheat on the take home portion of the exam, because if they are using last semesters locations it will be very obvious, and I only leave the links up for the day of the exam. This is another way that schools can fight off plagerism and cheating.

Attachment: Geog 101L Earthquake Pocket Sheet.pdf (420.0KB)

This isn't directly related to wikis but is worth keeping your eye on if you are involved in online courses:

U.S. Push for Free Online Courses
June 29, 2009

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/ccplan

Patricia (Mentor)

I don't know about the rest of you--what your situations are, but I'm convinced that our school would benefit from having a license for premium wikis for our educational community. But with budgets being what they are, I need more than just my experiences from summer camp and from teacher testimony about my school's use of free wikis in a couple of classes, and more than PBworks promotion literature, to start to convince the powers that be (the administrators, the people in the district office, the Board of Education) that spending the $ is a good decision.
Being able to peg our experiences to good, solid education research should help.
I'd love to see people add to this thread with any journal articles or professional magazine articles we could use to butress our arguments for the expenditure.
This was brought to mind today, when I opened up  newest my issue of Tech Trends,  which I received just the other day, and found this article:
"Learning course content by creating a wiki," by K/ I. Matthew & E. Felvegi in Tech Trends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning, Vol. 53.3 (May/June 2009), published by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).
Who's got some other articles to recommend?

-betsyh

Betsy,
I think that it is crazy to even have to do this.  I did a basic Google search about using wikis in the classroom and there were 1.4 million hits. I did a Google Scholar search and there were about ?? 80,000 hits.  Why is it that we have to convince them of what others have already proven and documented.  I am thinking about sending them a few article links daily from now until school opens so that hopefully they will accept the fact that wikis are here to say and those of us who use them are forever changed for the best.