My daughter loves her wiki!
At the dinner table the other night I was talking about the wiki project I’ve been working on here for our Center for Excellence. My daughter Diana, six years old, loved the word wiki, and I explained the origins of the term and what a wiki is. On Sunday I sat down with her and signed up for a pbwiki. (An interesting side note here is the number of unavailable names for wikis there, which looks a lot like “wiki squatting.”)
I didn’t tell Diana what to write about, and she decided she was interested in writing about pandas since she had recently done a report on them at school. What she wrote is entirely from memory and she only asked me to help her spell a couple of words–special and endangered. As soon as I told her endangered is based on danger, she had no problem with it. She still has more she wants to write about pandas, but it takes her quite a while to peck out her thoughts on the keyboard. She didn’t want me to type while she dictated to me.
As a father and educator, I’m really impressed with how easy and motivating this wiki business is to even very young kids. However, it also presents a few challenges.
How much editing/correcting should I do? She’s probably ready to learn about paragraphs, and she definitely needs to organize her thoughts better. I don’t want to suggest so many changes that she becomes frustrated or loses ownership.
How can I use the wiki to suggest changes without “defacing” it? Again, I don’t want to overwhelm and frustrate, but I do want to communicate my high expectations.
How much technology should I teach her? I helped her search flickr for CC images of pandas, saved one to the desktop, uploaded it to her wiki and added it to her page. I also had to enter a little HTML to get the text to flow to the side of the image. This is where I think most wikis fail in terms of usability–you should be able to upload a picture to a page and tick a box that asks you if you want it to be displayed or marked as an attachment. So six-year olds can use them. 
Diana loves to draw, so I’m hesitant to ask her to hunt down pictures on the web; I’d rather she draw a picture so we could scan it.
What level of citation is required for this age? I suspect that she memorized one or two phrases from a book on pandas. I always encourage her to use her own words, and she is getting better at it. I don’t suppose it’s ever too early to teach good citation practice.
One of the joys for me has been watching how much more my daughter is willing to do beyond what was required by the teacher. Guidelines are good, but do they limit or hold back our students?
Diana talked at length about how humans are encroaching on the panda’s habitat. I could tell she was very concerned about this, so I played her Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi (they paved paradise and put up a parking lot…they cut down all the trees and put them in a tree museum / and they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em…don’t it always seem to go you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone), which she got a big kick out of. My mind is teeming with all the things we can explore on this topic.
We’ll have a chance for some real learning now that school is out of the way.
