For years collaborative tools have promised to transform the workplace. I recall how privileged my class felt to receive complimentary copies of Lotus Notes as students in Professor Tom Malone's MIT Sloan class. We thought Notes was the wave of the future, just as others have expected Groove, Sharepoint, or other technologies to take off. But none of these tools have come close to changing how we work as much as e-mail has.
Until now.
Wikis may very well become the next technology to change how organizations operate because they offer an easy, cheap, no-nonsense way to capture organizational memory. A wiki, for the uninitiated, is open-source software that allows individuals to create and edit content on a web page. For more context, Bill Ives provides a good introduction to wikis. To get a quick feel for wikis, take a one-minute crash course and then go visit the WikiWikiSandbox to try it out yourself.
Once you recognize the power of the wiki, it's easy to see why trust is frequently mentioned in the same breath as wikis. Wikis will only take off where the culture and process already incorporate an element of trust that can foster collaboration. Ironically, e-mail saturation in organizations has created an opportunity for wikis. Group e-mails or distribution lists assumed to include people who all trust each other can easily be replaced by wikis, with the added advantage of capturing the content history for future reference.
The potential for the application of wikis in education is enormous and is yet to be tapped. It can enable collaborative student projects such as one college seminar project at Bowdoin College. It could also enable facilitation of curriculum design or discussion of best practices across schools. The same could also be said for blogging, but the wiki offers the additional bonus of a collaborative experience for creating a shared product. Whereas blogs ensure the integrity of each voice, wikis arguably promote the integrity of the product at the expense of contributors. It is where the education community trusts it is working toward the same shared objectives that wikis will have the most impact in education.
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