CEP 811 Wikis for work

In this session, we learned about wikis, edited a Wikipedia page, and created our own wikis for collaboration or other work in our classrooms.  I'd already had some experience with wikis as I had my students create and maintain wikis to be used a study guides throughout the second semester of the school year last year.  It proved to be a rewarding process through which my students and myself learned about collaboration and wiki creation.
This isn't my first time experiencing the editing of our school wikipedia entry either.  A few years ago, someone thought that it would be funny to add some interesting comments and "facts" to the Okemos High School page.  It looks great now and I see that someone is continuing to monitor it.  When I went to the site, I had planned to add the name of our new principal, however, it was already changed, although spelled incorrectly so I corrected that spelling.  I also added information about our ranking in the state of Michigan according to Newsweek.

Here's a screen capture of the changes that I made to the OHS wikipedia page.

I finished this session by creating a wiki for my department using pbworks.  Previously, I'd worked with wikispaces so I wanted to try a different wiki creation software.  While I would say that wikispaces is more intuitive and user friendly, pbworks does seem to have some unique and useful features such as the sidebar.  The url of the wiki that I've created is http://ohsmathematics.pbworks.com.   I hope to use this site with my department to post meeting minutes, build weekly meeting agendas, create and edit policy documents, curriculum collaboration, among other things.  I wonder how successful this endeavor will be.  Some may think that the old way that we do things worked just fine.  We shall see.