Sunday, June 15, 2008

More on Wikis

I'm spending this beautiful Sunday afternoon preparing my CASAS Summer Institute workshops. Thinking about wikis, as I link our wiki on wikis to adult ed wikis, and collections of more wikis. Last year when I did this workshop, the only adult education wiki example I had was the ALE wiki. Now I have several of my own, and many examples from teachers and administrators of how they're using wikis. This serves as a reminder that people take up a new idea when it meets a specific need they have.

Several adult education programs have used a wiki to create their WASC review documents, an extended collaborative process. Almost any time you want to write something together with people who aren't sitting next to you, a wiki is the answer.

Here are examples of wikis I've been involved with in the last few months:
- monthly team report on federal project, where the team is in MI and CA
- attempt to categorize all adult education professional development workshops and courses from all leadership projects
- pages of links that we use as examples in our conference presentations
- wiki site for adult educators in CA to share links and documents they've created
- planning site for the electronic village at CATESOL next April

In all these cases, the purpose is to write a document with input from team members in different cities or states. Seems incredibly obvious today, but a year ago it wasn't so clear to me.