Engaging with a Wiki

I recently used Wikispaces to create my own Wiki. It took me a while to decide what theme/subject to use for my Wiki as I wanted it to be an authentic task. I chose health and fitness, specifically how it relates to learning and education.

Announcing The Fitness Project wiki!

This is not my first experience with starting a Wiki. At my last job I was the one and only technical support consultant in Australia for a small company called DigitalRez. The head office was in Canada and they had a much larger tech support team with years of experience. The difficulty I had was with the time difference. When I really needed their help they were asleep. During my time there (3 years) I had to basically figure most things out for myself which led me to creating a Wiki as a knowledge base (wiki.digitalrez.com.au). Initially I created it with the view that it would just be for internal tech support staff but it actually became a quick and easy way of supporting some of the customers if they rang to ask a very common question.

Reflecting on that past experience, I found it really hard to get other members of the tech support team (i.e. the Canadians) to contribute to the Wiki. They used the information that was on there but very rarely added anything themselves. I think one of the main reasons might have been that I came up with the idea for the Wiki, created it and then presented a well-established product to the group. I may have had more success in leading the group to decide that it would be a really useful resource to have and working on it as a group from the start.

I believe that Wikis could be a great way of engaging students in a classroom setting in a group exercise. As long as they are introduced in the right way and each group member is encouraged to participate. A difficulty could be in one bright or committed student taking over and setting up the whole thing, leaving the other students feeling like they don't know what is going on or understanding what they should be doing. As long as you monitor the activites to make sure that doesn't happen, a wiki is an excellent way of encouraging students to engage in and outside of school.