Ride the Wiki-Wiki Bus

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume you are familiar with Wikipedia. If so, you know what a wiki can do. What you probably don’t know is what “wiki” means. Evidently it’s an Hawaiian word for “quick”, adopted by the inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, when he rode the Wiki-Wiki bus in Hawaii.

Ok, so a wiki is a searchable database of information. How is that different from a help file? Well, for one thing it is web-based and so globally accessible and centrally maintainable. But the real beauty is that a wiki can be maintained by the user community. Gulp. Is this a good thing? Well if it’s not, then we’re in a heap of trouble because this is the direction that the online world is going, full steam ahead.

So consider this – what’s the biggest challenge to corporate training developers? I would say it’s getting content from the experts. To develop the “learning organization” you need to gather and distribute information. That’s pretty much all we do in education, in a sense. A wiki does both. The courseware developers are not the content experts, so they typically got to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for content. That’s great, but what if you could gather knowledge from everyone in the organization who has some expertise in some area? That’s what a wiki can do for you. Ok, don’t panic, you can lock it down so that users can’t contribute if you feel that is appropriate.

I heard a couple of speakers at DevLearn 2007 say that they are now using wikis instead of RoboHelp, and that companies are using wiki’s (behind a firewall) as a replacement for their intranets.

If you want to know more about wikis, here’s a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki. A wiki about wikis – what else?

For an interesting example of using a wiki in the education field, check out http://collaborativelearning.pbwiki.com/.

Your Very Own Wiki

Got 30 seconds to spare? Start your own wiki. You can do that for free at http://www.pbwiki.com/. It’s a miracle of the new economy. And, haha, yes you can set it up in 30 seconds but, if your wiki is something you are passionate about, you will soon find that it begins to consume every free moment…how do I know?

My Very Own Wiki

To see my own very first wiki, for Youth Orchestras (a special interest of mine), check out http://yomusic.pbwiki.com/. It's very new...I have not launched it to the YO community yet so it is just a shell...the content will come from the community. I plan to launch it this weekend!