OPLS blog

Some extraordinary work has been done recently by Richard Allaway, Jim Williams and Natasha Winnard on a wiki to support the new IB Diploma Geography guide being launched in February next year. Drawing on their considerable experience in the subject, they have put together an outstanding resource structured around the forthcoming syllabus content. Full of web links, textbook references and the application of geographical skills, the wiki is constantly being updated as Richard et al come across new resources on the web.

How does it work? Well, they all have Delicious accounts and as they come across something useful on the web, they simply tag the resource using a previously agreed taxonomy and it automatically displays on the wiki via RSS. Thus a web link for Disparities in Wealth and Development could be tagged with ibgeog2009 and disparities_indicators or disparities_patterns for example.

It demonstrates the enormous power for social constructionism that wikis have and also how communities of practice can take a basic document like a subject guide and add real value to it for themselves and others. I encourage you to take a look when you have time, and if you’re a geography teacher, you can suggest resources or discuss an issue with them too. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

Tom Hemingway, over in Ankara (though not for much longer, sadly) has begun a wiki to help his successor quickly get to grips with coordinating the IB’s diploma programme in TED Ankara College.

He has very kindly opened this up to the IB community in general, so please take a look.

In his own words:

“This site is designed as a virtual handbook for IBDP coordinators at TED Ankara College, but coordinators
from other schools are welcome to take and use what they like. The site contents are listed on the left, and
are organized according to high school grade. If you’re new to this site, I suggest that you start with the Calendar page. You can follow the links in the calendar to relevant pages that explain the tasks.

This is very much a work in progress, but this project could lead to something of more general benefit to IB
programs in other schools. If you have suggestions for improvement, please click on the Discussion tab on
any page, or click on my icon at the bottom of this screen to send me a message.”

Thanks Tom, and good luck with your move back to the US.

Recently, I was alerted to an initiative by some of our diploma geography teachers - a subject-based wiki designed to support the teaching and learning of the current syllabus (guide or specification).

It’s another great example of how tools like wikis can harness the collective intelligence of the IB teaching community and an important pointer for future OCC development.

They’ve used wikispaces but it could easily have been set up on any other wiki platform.

Have a look for yourselves here: IBgeog Wiki.  Great stuff!

Earlier this year, Paul Fairbrother and I presented at a couple of IB conferences on the use of emerging social media tools in education.

In preparing for these presentations we constructed a wiki using wikispaces. There are many other platforms, including mediawiki (the software originally written for wikipedia) and wetpaint, but this one appealed because of its simplicity and the fact that at the time they were giving away a number of free wikispaces to schools.

Initially, the intention was to keep the wiki to ourselves, but it soon became clear that others would benefit from having access, in order to find more examples of what we were talking about in the presentations themselves. So we decided to release it; first to conference participants, and now to readers of this blog.

Wherever possible, we have tried to give examples from IB schools, but occasionally we’ve had to go beyond this community in order to illustrate certain tools or concepts that aren’t yet fully established. As you can imagine, so much of what we refer to changes so quickly.

So, here it is: Web 2.0 on wikispaces.

Please feel to contribute your own examples and add further topics where appropriate - there is so much more to discuss.