Two thoughtful pieces on failures to implement wikis in the field:
First, Connected, distributed work
80% of my time goes into coordination – communicating with people. The only tools that aid in communication are e-mail, instant messaging and phone. We made an effort to introduce all involved to the concept of Wiki and use it wherever possible to reduce the time and effort spent in writing/forwarding e-mails and communicating the same idea to a million people in a million ways (ok I’m exaggerating here). However all efforts went in vain…
Then Wikis in classrooms and Aiming for communal constructivism in a wiki environment
I guess I’m making a criticism of instructionist classroom methods where they stifle or limit student-to-student interaction. I do think that lectures have their place but for certain subject matter, a lecture would not be suitable. Each week, I prepared the material, each week I contrived some kind of in-class activity to let people ‘interact’. But as I mentioned before, I was merely creating fill-in-the-blanks exercises… I realize now, that to get to the level of which I was aiming, in terms of communal constructivism, you need to let the participants identify their own blanks
These posts interest me because they are rooted in practice, not theory, and address the sense of surprise and resistance users often feel when exposed to wikis.