Three years ago, the second to last week before school got out, a friend of mine suggested using a wiki for my incoming sophomore's summer reading project. In the past, summer reading consisted of essays, double-entry journal, or some other assignment, that I later learned was, was rushed together the day or two before school started up again. So in a mad rush, I Googled 'free wiki,' spent about 10 minuted perusing pbwiki (now pbworks) and wikispaces, and ultimately chose wikispaces for the discussion element. Two sleepless nights later, I had a summer reading wiki set up-complete with pictures, a poll, and some other 'stuff', a letter to send home with the students, and my wiki journey was underway.



Since then, I have worked with a variety of wikis, enjoying each one for its distinguishing strengths (I apologize, wetpaint, that this is my first journey into your realm). I continued with wikispaces for a second year (ultimately moving the project to Moodle for, among many reasons, greater ease of assessing a single student's contributions to a discussion). At the time it was the one I was most familiar with, and the navigation bar on the left side makes it easy to have ten discussions happening at once. Additionally, the four tabs across the top of each page are organizational bliss, since the summer reading assignment was not only to discuss the books but also to build a page with artifacts about the book.

The same year I discovered wikispaces, I found PBwiki. With a sidebar similar to wikispaces, more professional looking templates, but discussion seeming awkward and bulky, I decided to try it out as a class log. It was great for the students to have a place to look if they had missing work, and it was great for me to keep track of what we were doing in class as a reference. I was learning the many different roles that a wiki could have (esp. in education).



Recently I have used mediawiki (discussion option weak, very organized and linear-great for long pieces, like the automatic contents, editing takes some getting used to), wikispaces (nice to look at, creative options, easy to edit, discussion is selling point), and PBworks (professional, discussion/comments still a bit awkward, easy to edit) for projects with my peers. interestingly enough, it was the most productive collaboration I have been a part of in a long time. When we work together at school, or at district meetings, the conversational element is an important part of work, and it's great. Having the personal relationship with peers is helpful in coming to real solutions and having constructive conversations without offending. With a wiki, however, a lot of the social element is absent, meaning that time on task is huge. Constructive comments can be a little more sensitive depending on the existing relationship you have with co-collaborators. I suppose, if working with people you know pretty well, wikis could be nothing but good.