Great comments and questions during the wiki panel this morning. One topic that came up was students’ comfort levels with editing each other’s work in the wiki. I’m intrigued by this, because while I find the idea of collaborative authorship fascinating (and I’m always dreaming about what the perfect collaborative writing tool would be), I myself have difficulty editing other people’s words in the wikis I participate in. One thing that occurs to me (which is probably pretty obvious, but only just now came to me) is how social relationships outside of the technology affect the ways in which people work in wikis.  Relationships among students probably play out in the wiki–and we have no way of knowing or controlling those relationships. Just another reminder to me that while the technology can augment and alter the ways we communicate, there are essential “human” hurdles that technology cannot flatten.

Dave worried about his students’ unwillingness to use Skype in conjunction with the research wiki, as he had planned. But if they used IM and cell phones for real time collaboration and it worked, what’s the problem? One of the things I’ve discovered with wikis is that they never end up the way I had planned. That’s okay, since the students used the wiki to work effectively for them. Isn’t that the point?

Just my 2 cents,

- Steve