UW-Milwaukee has a 4-part course entitled Why Wiki? available online from the UWM Libraries web site. It’s an excellent introduction to the wiki and look at some of the issues surrounding Wikipedia, and it will be on my short list of highly recommended resources. One small [Read more]

Campus Technology reports that MIT and Wharton will publish a textbook collaboratively written on a wiki, called, “We Are Smarter Than Me.” The authors have invited the public to help create what they’re calling a “networked book.” More information is available at [Read more]

GMU Wiki Workshop: Nice to see that Rick Reo at George Mason University (one of the coauthors of Using Wiki in Education, the wiki-based book) is running a wiki workshop this week. Based on [Read more]

The Design Encyclopedia – A growing, collaborative resource that describes, tracks and explains culture, commerce, politics, media, sports, brands – everything possible, really – through design. The encyclopedia has Rules of (Wiki) Engagement, which is a very good [Read more]

Inspired by Google Maps and Wikipedia, Wikimapia is a map/wiki mashup where one can add a wiki entry about any place in the world. It works with Google Earth, and GPS devices, and requires the community to vote on the addition of places, which is a good way to [Read more]

• The Power of We – Companies are using YouTube-like technology to tap the ideas and energy of employees. As more companies adopt social networks, wiki, blog, and other collaborative knowledge construction and sharing tools, it becomes ever more imperative for education to prepare students to be savvy users. [Read more]

• How to start an activity centric wiki – good information from Wiki That, a blog that focuses on wiki uses for civic and enterprise groups. [Read more]

• Top Five Wired Nations – 1 Singapore, 2 Denmark, 3 Canada, 4 Sweden, 5 United States (via digg)
• Consulting firm Resource Interactive conducted an eight week study of Digital Millennials – the results are a must read for anyone who wants to understand today’s students. During her keynote at the Shop.org Annual Summit in New York this morning, Resource Interactive CEO & Chief Experience Officer Kelly Mooney said, “Digital millennials see the world differently than previous generations for a long list of societal, cultural and economic reasons.” The 14-24 age group has grown up knowing a world that has been “always electronically connected, portable and customizable.” The technology immersion of the digital millennials is what is visible from the outside. On the inside, the digital millennials are breeding a new social order by using technology for “sharing, creating and validating via peer networks,” or social networking. (via Digital Micro-Markets)

• Writely gets positive review from Associated Press writer – Jessica Mintz, a Business Writer for the Associated Press, reviews Writely and finds it to be a solid writing and collaboration tool, albeit with a little polishing needed in a few places. “Writely stores documents without assigning any particular format. Users who want to download the document to their hard drives can save as HTML, rich text, Word, OpenOffice or Portable Document Format files.” This is an important point because it illustrates the real importance of the Internet to information. Web-based tools keep information format-independent which is better for knowledge construction, and also makes it easier to output that information in the optimal format depending on how it will be used.
  She also makes an important point about collaboration: “In the past, if five people needed to edit a report, some poor soul was stuck making sure changes were incorporated into one master document. With Writely, documents can be shared by sending an e-mail invitation to any number of people. All can work on the same page simultaneously; Writely saves often and keeps track of revisions, highlighting changes and additions from different editors in bright colors.”
• Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0 – Brian Benzinger, a fellow 9rules member, is writing a 3 part series on Web 2.0 tools that students might find useful. He covers a wide range of tools, including, organization, presentation, collaboration, to do list, gradebook, and resume writing to name just a few. Wiki tools like JotSpot and Writely (I consider Writely a very wiki-like tool although it’s officially a web word processor) are included in his reviews. Overall, this is a very useful guide to what’s available.
• Duiki: The Wiki of Duke University – “Duiki stems from the ideas of several individuals for implementing a freely accessible, freely editable, and extremely user-friendly website where useful and entertaining information about the city and the university can be collected. The central concept of Duiki is the ability for anyone to create an illustrated “entry” describing a place, event, person, or idea related to Duke, and make it possible for others to find and reference the entry in order to organize and build on the content.”

• Value of Wikis – from a great new blog called Bent Rules that I just found via the comments on the recent TechCrunch post about Socialtext 2.0. Aaron Wright has some great insight on how the wiki satisifies an information need better than other tools, as evidenced by this excerpt from this post: “Think about it. What will better serve the interests of a niche community, [Read more]