When I missed the wiki bus

I am on the steering committee for the PROWE project, and attended a meeting today. The project seems to be going well, but all this recent obsession with wikifying everything gave me cause to reflect on how I had rather missed the opportunity to get in early with this technology. In 1997 I attended a conference and heard Mark Guzdial talking about them. I could see how useful they’d be in distance education and when I came back to the OU I evangelised about them briefly. Then other things got in the way and I let them drop, and it was only last year that I finally introduced one on a course. I regret not having stuck at it a bit more in the early days – I could have become a wiki guru! Sadly my suggestion that we just put up a whole course in a wiki and let students update and modify it is always rebuffed on the grounds of quality assurance. Even the Open Content team baulked at it. Come on guys, go with the flow.

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