Week 5: Wikis for Personal Learning and Productivity

[Michele Martin]

In this forum, we'll discuss strategies for using wikis as a personal learning and productivity tool.

[Susan Neva]

I can definitely see myself using a wiki as a personal project management tool, and as an eportfolio.
(I would also like to set up a wiki to facilitate some of the writing and research projects I work on at work, but that's a different discussion.)

In terms of personal project management, I'm thinking of both career- and non-career related projects that I'm currently keeping track of using a personal journal approach. This would be a private site, viewable to me only. (And I don't envision entirely replacing my paper journal approach-- I like and need to have something tangible to work with and write on when I commuting on the train, for example.) It would be nice if it's easy to toggle the private to public if I so choose.

For the eportfolio/blog portion, I would want that to be public-- so the world can see what I've done, and what I'm currently working on. I have way too many papers from past projects sitting in the garage, waiting to see the light of day so they can be archived and properly stored. I've been thinking of scanning important documents into pdf files, so they can be saved.

The fewer websites I have to work with, the better.

[mireille]

I'm currently taking advantage of the following resources

WikiEducator - a free 12 day course
http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

Reading a book on Wikis called - Wikis for Dummies
Authors: Dan Woods and Peter Thoeny
Forward by Ward Cunningham (inventor of wikis)
Published: Wiley, 2007

One of my projects for the course is called Using Software to Increase your Productivity with Minimal Stress

I'm personally getting down right tired of having tools thrown at me with no idea on how I can use it to increase my productivity minimal stress.

I'm really looking forward to learning more how I can use wikis as a Personal Learning and Productivity Tool

I have read your articles Michele on Personal Learning Environments. I'm going to take some of those suggestions and apply them in the creation of my wiki for this course .----------- so thank you

Mireille
Toronto, Ontario Canada

[Michele Martin]

Hi Mireille--I definitely hear you on having tools thrown at you with no idea how they can actually help you become more productive. For me, wikis have been a great addition to my toolkit. I usually use Wikispaces (although I've also used PBWiki) and I probably have at least 30 wikis I've set up. I use them a lot for research--an easy way to save all kinds of files, presentations, etc. I've also been using them as my "handouts" for any training I do. Having seen how often people get paper that they never use again, I've decided that online versions are a much better option. Fewer trees killed and much more useful because I can embed so many other resources. I'd have to say that along with my blog and my Delicious account, my wikis are probably the tools that I use the most.

[Kate]

Hi Michele,

Would you share one of your wiki links that you used as a 'handout' resource?

[Michele Martin]

Hi Kate--happy to. Here's one I did for a day-long workshop I did on teaching how to job search with social media. I also did a training for ASTD Cascadia on blogging, podcasting and screencasting and used this wiki. Look at the Beginner links because that's the track I taught. And here's a simple one I used to teach career assessment to Job Corps staff.

These have worked well not only as a handout, but also during the training because it makes it easy for me to be able to quickly get to links and multimedia I want to share while I'm working with the group. I don't tend to get a lot of people trying to edit or anything, so it's not particularly collaborative, but I continue to try to push that one. :-)

[Kate]

Thank you!
WOW! I cannot convey enough how valuable these examples are. I do a lot of face to face training and the wiki format be a far better fit for me to share resources and also allow participants to contribute their ideas/reflections.

[Michele Martin]

Glad this helped, Kate--would love to see what you come up with as I'm always wanting to see what other people are doing.

[Kate]

Just tried out Google Sites by presenting a first draft of content ideas for a website we are developing for faculty who wish to use iclickers.
http://sites.google.com/site/iclickers/Home
Since people from different departments will be contributing content and design ideas I sent this to the contributors to see if this tool will work with this drafting process.

[David Fair]

This is excellent! I have thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from this entire course, but I have been waiting for this week. I have spent the evening reviewing the wiki information and have set up my own personal wiki at pbwiki.com. Until now, I have been collecting information and formulating ideas for blogging in various places, but now I can gather all this in my wiki for personal development. I have set up my To Learn List as a page in my wiki and have begun linking it to other (related) pages in the wiki. I am already experiencing some of the benefits of wikis for personal development and organization, but I have also learned some new ideas for using wikis in corporate environments. I still need to learn more about persuading others to take ownership in wikis and how best to manage them, but I have found several resources here that address these issues as well. (I really like http://www.wikipatterns.com.)

Thank you!

[Michele Martin]

Hi David--glad you're already getting so much out of this module! Getting people to participate in using a wiki can definitely be a challenge and Stewart's Wikipatterns site is very helpful with that.

I've found that part of the problem is this idea of "ownership"--people have this unconscious idea that whoever creates a document "owns" it and so they feel very uncomfortable editing something that they feel belongs to someone else. You have to really give them permission.

The other thing I've done is force people to go to the wiki. About a year ago I had to write a large grant application to the federal government that required input from a lot of different people. I put everything into a wiki and then told the group that this was the only way we would work with it. If they had documents to share, they had to upload them to the wiki; I wasn't going to do it for them. Comments had to be shared on the wiki, too. It wasn't entirely successful because a few people still insisted on sending me emails, but it definitely got many people out of their email mindset.

[Melanie Jennings]

I so agree with this! I just thought it was a "southern" thing or a teacher thing - folks felt like they were being impolite and critical of other people's work when editing a common document in a wiki. They practically refused to do it. They might make a note of something that they thought should be changed, but actually replace someone else's words??? NEVER!

Thankfully, I find that K12 students are not so "kind" as to feel guilty about modifying the group document when working together on a group project.

I have a goal to get my community college students collaborating on lecture notes via a wiki. I presented the idea to them this semester, but they were less-than-interested in the idea. Maybe next semester, I'll make it mandatory... I don't know. Many of my CC students don't have solid note-taking skills. Working together on notes as a class will allow them to see note-taking modeled by the students who are more capable in this area. In addition, all students will have a more complete set of lecture notes from which to study.

Melanie

[EricWilbanks]

I love the wiki concept. I have a private wiki on Wetpaint that I use with a select group of folks interested in Rites of Passage for their kids. Of course, I have found the statistics from Forrester and Gartner to be quite accurate (I posted them Oct 23 to my delicious account: http://delicious.com/ericwilbanks), as only a small percentage of folks actually contribute content, even with such a select group.

On a slightly different subject, I have a question. Both on the intro to this week's topic and in Tony Karrer's TrainingMag Network presentation today, is this idea of "a private wiki used by one person for their own personal knowledge management." I'm curious...how is this different from using Google Docs (if the goal is to have your data stored on a server instead of your local machine)? Is there an advantage to using one over the other?

Looking forward to everyone's feedback. :-)