Electronic Journal, Week Three Prompt

What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in my work environment? As a member of a classroom support team from faculty and students at an online university, a wiki would serve as a repository for my associates and me. As a repository, a wiki could be used by us team members as a point of reference for frequently asked questions. Since our office very recently updated our LMS skin, links on the classroom pages have been renamed and relocated, thereby rendering obsolete many of the instructions in the existing LMS instructor guide. It would be useful, therefore, to have reference materials gathered together in a wiki. A wiki could also be used as a place to list services, available resources, and contact names.

How would they support learning and/or performance? Once all my group’s relevant content has been satisfactorily compiled in a wiki, it could be made available to faculty members as a reference source. The wiki could be used by faculty members as a reference to search for steps on how to set up an exam or to troubleshoot if a student cannot access a discussion group. In these scenarios a wiki could educate or refresh instructors’ memory, and allow them to perform more effectively, and in turn contribute to increasing student confidence in the course content.

What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? If this were to be accomplished by management, it could take months to agree on, and may involve other departments’ input, feedback and even permissions. This could also mean once all members or groups have signed off on the product, we could be locked into restrictive parameters such as what we could do or couldn’t post, and even perhaps be required to participate in a peer-review process where we’d be required to submit our team’s shared content for others’ review, and be responsible to review others’ submissions in other group wikis (I raise this scenario as a possibility because reviewing the marketing department’s post submissions for our institution’s webpage is one of my current responsibilities). We may also have to rely on in-house support if needed. In other words, I foresee having less control if I were to rely on management’s processes.

What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort? The user initiated effort in this case would be mine. I foresee that I would have to begin with a simple structure, perhaps a free user account. This would allow me the freedom to choose a wiki that I can evaluate and if it doesn’t suite my needs I can try another service. I don’t foresee that I would have to answer to an in-house authority and I would be free to make changes or add users on my own schedule. In other words, I foresee having more control if I were to initiate this effort.

The idea of creating a wiki for my team is one that I have already begun to research for my second produsage assignment, so this Week's subject prompt questions come at a good time.