Educause Quarterly has a piece by Roger McHaney on a relatively new wiki implementation called the Electronic Learning and Teaching Exchange (ELATE). Produced by Kansas State University, it’s a wiki that offers a wide variety of information divided into four categories: Course Issues, Instructors, Students, and Tools. It’s got an inviting UI and has entries that cover both the practitioner (Updating an Online Course) and theoretical (Building Mental Models) ends of the spectrum
A couple of standout points in the EQ article for me are the ANYSITE tool
… the ANYSITE extension, which allows embedding a live website within a wiki page. This feature enables a preview of a related website or distribution of digital artifacts such as e-books.
and the acknowledgement of the challenges associated with keeping a wiki community vibrant and participatory. On the latter, McHaney references Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and his three elements for facilitating success – promise, tools, and bargain.
The bargain is the most complex aspect of the balance because it involves user behaviors in response to the promise and tools. For ELATEwiki, the bargain becomes that contributions will be maintained, improved, policed, and used by a community of peers.
The direct reference to Shirky I think shows how much we’ve learned about what makes online communities work than in the early days where there was much more of a preoccupation with the tools.
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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Roger McHaney, Educause