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A wiki is a space on the Web where you can share work and ideas, pictures and links, videos and media — and anything else you can think of. Wikispaces is special because we give you a visual editor and a bunch of other tools to make sharing all kinds of content as easy for students as it is for their teachers.

A Wikispaces Private Label site is a secure, dedicated wiki environment — like a clone of Wikispaces.com, but with your organization’s DNA mixed in. You get unlimited wikis (and everything you need to manage them), plus tools to integrate the site with your other systems and support your users.

Welcome to the home page of the James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education and its flagship project, the Knowledge Web.

Founded by James Burke, the author, host, and narrator of the acclaimed television series Connections, the Institute exists to encourage innovative uses of educational technology.

I regularly ask my own students to challenge what is being said in the classroom. I advise them to question everything they hear, read or see, to help develop their critical thinking abilities, to practice defending or attacking a theory, to exercise their evaluative skills. I read recently of one professor who deliberately lied once each lesson, and challenged his students to detect the lie. As the lies became more subtle, the students began to struggle to detect the falsehood, until eventually they were at the point where they were deeply scrutinising everything that was presented in the lesson, and going beyond the content to make sure they had discovered the lie. They had to discuss extensively to put themselves in a position where they knew what was correct and what was incorrect. The web is a very fertile place to learn, but we all need to develop our critical awareness of what content is good and what is to be avoided.

What is today's student to make of all this? Deliberately misleading websites are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bad content on the web. Let's take this a little further. How do students discern the difference between a website that hosts good, empirical, well established content, and one that doesn't? And how do they detect when a website is not based on established fact, but is merely a collection of