I Heart My Wiki

I have finally thrown myself into the wiki waters. And I love it. Bye bye Word.

We installed MediaWiki on our local server a couple of weeks ago and I've been using it to record everything I can for my e-Learning strategy project.

The kickoff meeting agenda and notes went in the wiki. Interview transcripts go in the wiki. Notes from conversations with staff members go in the wiki. Brainstorms and project ideas go in the wiki.

In fact, it seems like the Strategic Plan is being written in the wiki. You might even say it's being written by the wiki. It just sort of flows that way.

I started off cutting and pasting a lot of documents from Word into the wiki. Now I've left Word behind and am writing everything directly in the wiki. I've had to get used to the formatting -- or lack thereof. I'm a Word power-user and love all the little tricks and shortcuts. I miss them.

But the payoff is huge. All of my project information is in one place. I don't have to open 800 documents. I have links galore.

I feel like I've created an actual thing, instead of just a bunch of words on a page.

So far, it's been highly uncollaborative. Just me with my wiki love. Next week, we'll have an internal project meeting. Everyone will have to look at the wiki first. My sense is, they'll learn a lot and come into that meeting with great ideas.

I plan on creating a complete draft of the Strategic Plan in the wiki. Of course, I'll transfer that into an official looking Word document/PDF to deliver to the client. But I suspect the wiki itself will be part of the deliverable package. What a great resource they'll have. And it will serve a double-purpose in terms of educating them about the potential uses for wikis within their organization.

Yes, I love my wiki.

Photo credit: "One Heart" by Sanja Gjenero from stock.xchng

Conversations do matter

I am still quite brain dead from the the eLearning Guild event. Dead and yet quite alive. More committed to the power of blogging than ever. It was amazing to pick up conversations with people I had never met -- to continue right where we had never actually started -- to weave more threads together. To put real personalities and faces and human warmth on top of all these words I have been reading.

So now I'm sold on the values of social networking tools and Web 2.0. Completely. And I may start proselytizing. The last session on Friday I sat in on was "It's not innovative if it doesn't educate." It was Web 2.0 for beginners. And I realized that I'm no longer a beginner. I didn't learn anything new about the technologies or even how they are being used. But what I did learn is how much other people still don't know about this stuff. To the two women I was sitting next to, I was an expert. "You blog?!" "What's a wiki?" Neither of them had ever touched either thing. Not even wikipedia.

I was shocked. And yet not shocked at all. It confirmed what I have been thinking: that most of the e-Learning and training world out there is still doing the same old same old. Some folks don't want to change. Some folks don't know that they will have to change. Some are starting to have an inkling. And some folks probably won't have to change at all -- the old order is fine and this may not solve a problem. There is room for everything.

I had so much to share with these women in just a few minutes and I think they walked away really seeing the potential in these tools for their organizations. They were excited.

An so am I.

Thanks to all of you that I had a chance to continue conversations begun online. It was awesome!