I believe that adult educators will start using wikis to share information and documents more and more. I already see this happening in the professional organizations and among various groups. If the leadership projects don't support and participate in this, we will become the followership projects.
So I'm starting a wiki for CA adult education. It will take a lot of work to get it off the ground, but I hope it will be a useful tool for our widespread community. The idea came out of a conversation with Martha Rankin from Newport Mesa. When she was setting up her professional learning community at her site, she googled a bunch of topics like "adult education professional learning community" and found pretty much nothing. She had to invent the wheel, since she couldn't find examples from other agencies that had already done some of the things she wanted to do. We made a list of things she would have liked to find online, and those are the first five pages of the CA Adult Ed Wiki.
My model for this project is the Adult Literacy Education wiki, started and managed by David Rosen. He has put a lot of work into keeping the organization of the site up with the added content and developments, as well as recruiting others to manage sections of the wiki. If this is something that the field wants, then it will take off, and there will be people to help manage it.
I chose WikiSpaces as the host, because they allow me to add members without charging for them, and because we have already been using them for our Web 2.0 presentations. I've had some struggles with the formatting, though. And I'm concerned about having this wiki on an outside site, but I think it has to be separate from CDE or OTAN or anything else. It has to have it's own separate, democratic identity and not be controlled by any one entity. There are already plenty of sites for the official word on everything.
