Wikis are fragile, handle with prayer

At the risk of being tagged a religious nutter, I'm a great believer in prayer... it changes things - see my personal web page. And students sometimes get themselves into a lather when someone changes something they have posted to a wiki page. But honestly, they don't have a prayer, because once the 'send' button has been pressed, the idea is no longer just 'theirs'. Now it belongs to the community members (see something wiki this way comes) who can have their wickied way with it.

There are several interesting comments from my own lot on our epedagogy wiki space attesting to their consternation. One threatened to commit homicide and another swore she would burst into tears if anyone had the guts to change their page entries. I'm sure they didn't mean it.... but I am two students down on my class register this week...

Anyway, whilst reading Will Richardson's book 'Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts' I came across the Wiki Prayer (p 74) today and thought I would share it with you...

Please grant me the serenity
To accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference...

Amen

Something Wiki this way comes...

We've been experimenting with wikis recently in the University of Plymouth down here in the South West of England. We've been using them since the start of the new term. Only a few weeks in, and already wikis appear to be paying dividends. The students who use them are undergrads and postgrads, and it will be interesting to see if they interact and/or transgress into each other's spaces during editing.

I'm most interested in the dynamics that go on between students when they are creating content and editing each other's work. Ownership seems to be a real issue for some - they quickly realise that once the 'send' button has been pressed, the content is no longer their own, but belongs to the entire learning community, to alter, extend, mix, mashup or delete as they see fit. Its a problem for some, but I guess they will get used to it.... I hope to present a paper (or two) on our findings later in the year, probably at the EDEN conference, aptly entitled 'New Learning 2.0?' in Naples in June.

In the meantime, we are using two wikis: epedagogy and IMPOnline.

Check out a really useful (but slightly dated) commentary on wikis at Using Wiki in Education - it also offers some useful links to previous work and good tips about ways to use wikis in education.