wiki it

In January I took a 3-day workshop on integrating technology into the classroom through the Center for Faculty Development. I learned about all sorts of new instructional resources, but the one that has changed my work life the most is wikis. I've used Wikipedia for years and encourage my students to use it as well. It's a wonderful example of how people can work collaboratively to compile an impressive database of knowledge. It also highlights some of the flaws or missing pieces in that knowledge--some entries are clearly better than others. Still, I didn't understand the full potential of wikis to coordinate a group's work.

After the workshop, I set up two wikis for the department faculty. One for the tenure-track faculty and full-time lecturers with programmatic responsibilities. The other wiki is for all the faculty. Both have proved instrumental in sharing knowledge and accomplishing tasks. I don't think we could have accomplished what we did in the spring semester without the wikis.

So in addition to building blogs into my online classes, I'm going to use wikis in the fall. For this class, students will post all aspects of their research projects to the wiki. This will allow current students to share information related to their projects. And the wikis will allow me to build institutional memory--each semester, students will add to the wiki. Later classes will be able to benefit from the knowledge based begun by earlier classes.

~ Professor Cyborg