Wikis Get Users Talking, Collaborating at MIT, Johns Hopkins
Campus Technology writer Linda L. Briggs discusses wiki use with Carter Snowden of MIT and Geof Corb of Johns Hopkins University:
MIT, which has been running Confluence for about three years, has several thousand users and a couple hundred classes using Confluence in some way. Academic uses range from urban studies to the Sloan School of Management; from a team developing an electric car to a committee on intellectual property.
Carter Snowden talks about the ease of setting up a wiki, and how MIT automates and streamlines the procedure for creating new wiki spaces and giving users appropriate permissions:
He hasn’t found wikis a challenge to set up or maintain, Snowden said–the product has been easy enough to use that little user training or support is involved. “Confluence is pretty reliable; set it up and it runs itself,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of worry about things going down.” MIT has procedures in place when a user requests a new shared “space” in Confluence, which can be done by a designated person in the information technology department. Add-on scripts written at MIT make creating a space and assigning a space administrator a straightforward process even for a non-technical person.
Geof Corb of Johns Hopkins explains how the wiki informs people when information is added, draws them in to contribute to pages, and fosters creative innovation:
“The thing I find most effective about Confluence,” Corb explained, “is the ability to very quickly just create a page, or if you prefer, a news entry or a blog posting, with an idea. So I can say, I have an idea–I wish that I had something that did this … and here’s what it would do…. As soon as I do that, it shows up in the dashboard of everyone who has access to the space when I created the page. They might click on it out of nothing more than curiosity, and then start contributing to my idea. And before you know it, you have this snowball effect of creative innovation happening, from mundane topics to exciting topics.”
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