How to Use Wikis June 7, 2007
Posted by B.J. Schone in eLearning.Tags: Development, eLearning, Tools, Wikis
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Wikis are an interesting creature to me. I know they can be incredibly useful for collaborative work, but I’m trying to figure out the best ways for implementing them within an organization. I’m struggling to define their role.
Here are my questions:
- Should you use wikis in training? For example, in instructor-led or virtual-classroom training, do you have the learners split into teams and work on a project together using a wiki? If you do this, is there any value to keeping the wiki around after training?
- Should you just provide a wiki platform to your entire organization and let them do with it what they want?
- Do you create a wiki for an entire organization? Or just a smaller group (ex. department)?
- If a group of people wants to focus on a particular topic, should they create their own wiki or contribute information to Wikipedia? For example, if a group of trainers wanted to create a wiki dedicated to training and development, how do they decide where the best place is to post their information?
Maybe these questions will answer themselves when I implement my first wiki. Until then, I’m going to explore the different types / brands of wikis and research as much as I can.
Here’s a great video from CommonCraft called "Wikis in Plain English." This is a must watch if you are new to wikis. Great stuff.
B.J. Schone
Eric Matas
kevinthorn
eLearning Weekly 
What I found with wikis was that the more I used them, the more I saw ways to use them in different scenarios and in different ways. I’ve used wikis for training as a way to provide handouts and follow-up information, to manage projects, to brainstorm and keep ideas for future projects, to write grants that required the input and collaboration of several people, to document policies and procedures and so on.
Because there are so many free wiki tools and once you know how to use them, they’re as easy as using a word processing document, I think that you can use wikis individually, for teams and across an organization for various reasons. For example, you might have an organization-wide wiki for frequently asked questions, a department wiki for running your projects and sharing information within the department and then individual wikis that individual employees might use to manage their own work. You can easily experiment with what works best and get rid of what doesn’t work.
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