When I thought about creating a wiki for this class, I considered and discarded several ideas: a blog type wiki to share different educational software – websites – resources, a collaborative wiki to develop SPED practices, a collaborative wiki to increase awareness and use of Customer Care Practices, etc.
Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to establish a collaborative wiki that I can use for professional development when I start working as an administrator. With this site, I hope to start a new trend (a la Alan November) to refocus our efforts in education onto the dissemination of information and the increase of professional communication. I have noticed a troubling trend in education toward frequent changes in how we do what we do without allowing time for the new thing to be successful. I believe that this unfortunate trend is due to focus being too much on how we do things instead of being on what we do.
I have not begun implementing yet, because I am not an administrator at this time and have not had a chance to discuss this with my current administrators to see if they would be willing to make us of my ideas and efforts.
In using wikis, we should be able to make the information/training/resources available to more and more people over time. But, at the same time, if it is made a collaborative wiki (like Wikipedia) there is the risk that some contributors/editors may add information that is incorrect. To avoid this problem would be a time-consuming effort because it would require the main administrator and other contributors/editors to check and verify all information that is added to the wiki.
Wikis have some potential for engaging digital natives if they are properly used. Digital natives tend to prefer colorful and varied presentations that also have hotlinks and multimedia components that allow them to interact directly with the information that is presented to them. But, if the wiki is used as simply a static page that the natives are supposed to just read or view, then it will be not much more useful than a textbook.
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