The Value of Wiki Collaboration

Bob Coffield, a West Virginia blogger and lawyer, has a great post today about the value of wiki collaboration. I see this value proposition on a daily basis.  

Look at the required process for sharing documents via email. 

Wikinomics Image

The only real benefit that using word processing is ease of formatting.  You can run into some formatting issues when using wiki's as your primary editing tool. One thing I've learned is that quick table editing in WikiMedia can cause troubles down the road if you want to transfer the information to Excel to allow for calculations.   However, I still feel it is worth using a wiki for sharing any information. 

What about you? Do you send a draft of a document around via email? Do you have 4 or more versions of it on your computer wondering if you need to keep them all?  Have you ever got a large document that someone else has edited and you have no idea what they have changed? These are all reasons to use wikis.   I know that online collaborative documents are getting popular and for good reason, Google Docs and Zoho are really getting popular and I use them both in addition to using wikis.  They offer a little more control over the document that you are creating then a wiki, such as who can edit it.

Bob is a lawyer in Charleston and deals with the healthcare industry. I wonder how many hospitals have a wiki?

Of course in Globaloria, everything is on the wiki, so everything is already in a great collaborative format.   I would love to see more of us put more of our information in wiki pages, making it easy to share and easy to collaborate.

How does a wiki work?

My last post made me think about this video. If you plan to use a wiki in your classroom or if you are already in the MyGLife project you should watch it and have your students watch it. It will give you great idea of how a wiki works. CommonCraft have done a lot of great videos in this format.




Other Great Videos

Zoombies in Plain English

How to Create a New Course Curriculum in Realtime

Imagine if you will... you are teaching a class. It could be anything English, Math, Science, or even Technology. The textbook for the course has a tutorial that introduces a primary concept, however, unlike a lot of the text this first tutorial uses an instructional method that is not very effective for your classroom. It is factual, but your students don't really grasp the concept when through go through the activity. So, as their Instructor, you decide that you need to identify a new tutorial to replace that one, or at least augment or add to that instruction. So you go find one on the Internet and stick it in the text.

Well this happened, today. Except it wasn't a textbook it was a wiki.

The MyGLife students in Charleston were working on the Interaction section of the curriculum that taught them how to create a button. Their Instructor found another module that was also helpful in teaching the creation of Flash buttons and just added to the wiki (well actually a student added it to the wiki). New instruction for everyone in a matter of moments.

This is what it looked like before....


Add here it is after. Simple, easy, effective!



If you are a MyGLife Educator, make your wiki your own and maybe keep an eye on the other classes wikis as well!