A Catalog of CoWeb Uses

Abstract

Use of the CoWeb (or Swiki) is now two years long at Georgia Tech. Over 120 of those CoWebs, across some ten servers, have been created and used by literally several thousand students. The inventiveness of the teachers and students has been amazing. Teachers (and, in many cases, students) have developed some tremendously innovative and useful activities for learning.

However, very few teachers have the time to look at other teachers' CoWebs, so the insight doesn't get shared with others who might use it! The invented activities are often transportable from one domain to another, but the inventor doesn't have time (or even a forum) for sharing it with possible adopters. There is a real need for a kind of catalog of uses for the CoWeb in order to share them.

This document is a first pass at a catalog, to help inform other CoWeb-using teachers about the bright ideas of others.

Preceeding the catalog is a brief section suggesting ways of combining these activities in a real classroom. We recognize that different styles of class will lend themselves more to some kinds of activities than others. Our description talks about the interaction between class style and content with our experience with the different kinds of activities.