Czech Mates

We're off in a few days to the Czech Republic for a study tour, myself and about 30 mature students. It's an annual event and we spend a week travelling about, visiting schools, colleges, universities, prisons, etc... areas related to the disciplines my students are teaching. They return to write an assignment comparing aspects of Czech education with that of the British system.

To support my group of travellers this year, I set up a small wiki space called Czech Mates so that the students can share any useful links and resources they found with the rest of the group. To date there hasn't been a lot of activity on the space, although around 20 have joined it. Perhaps people are reluctant to post to the pages until they are more familiar with it, or maybe they are shy about participation. It's the same with other online groups I have managed. My research so far indicates that many students find contributing to a wiki to be quite stressful, as people don't like 'tipping their hand' and exposing their ideas for criticism, or in the case of wikis, to risk others modifying, or worse, deleting their work...

I guess I'm now interested to see what photos, stories, memories, etc will be posted to the space when the group get back after the study tour. If you have any research findings on wiki participation, I'd be happy to see them posted in response to this.