recent changes camp

Finally finding a minute to post some notes and reflections on last weekends RCC in Canberra focusing on wikis.

I've got to say that beforehand I couldn't see how 3 days could possibly be spent talking about wikis, and while for me the conversations around learning and teaching were far more interesting, the breadth of wiki-related topics covered and the diversity of wiki interests represented was great. Two of the education focused conversations were captured by Steph over at TalkingVTE here and here, and there are moves to write up a Declaration (called Bruce) that as Tom Worthington aptly describes  'is intended to inform current government inquiries into education and into the NBN. Policies, programs and funding could then be provided to have services directly to students, resources for teachers and for educational institutions'.  See Tom's post for more on this and if interested let us know.

Mark Dilley from AboutUs.org acted facilitator. I'm still trying to get my head around how useful and/or sustainable the site might be. It's described as 'for and about businesses, organizations, blogs, forums -really anyone who has a website'.... aiming to 'provide visitors with information about websites, a way to share their knowledge about websites, and a place to promote their own sites.' Given that I have trouble posting to and keeping up to date my existing sites I'm not sure how I'll go with this but ready to be convinced....

It was interesting to speak to the guys from Lonely Planet about their wiki use and perceived future directions. They freely admitted that the company is still book-oriented and agreed that changes were needed if they were to remain the travel guide/network of choice especially for the younger travelers. They need to be responding to these kinds of demands and fast.

There was a lot of talk about Wikipedia and mediawiki. After my failed attempt to create a page on wikipedia with Alex Hayes and the subsequent lack of any forum for discussion about it, or recourse, I'm not a big believer of its democratic capabilities. There was however some interesting discussion around troublemakers, editors, peacekeepers and facilitators. Although some form of moderation via 'official moderators' or the community is clearly needed I kept getting a niggly sense that its pretty autocratic in the end.

We spent a couple of hours talking about the wiki 'facilitator' role. Having educators, users, editors etc all side by side enabled some interesting discussion which I attempted to capture here...

[CC FlickR image by robynejay]

Thanks to all the sponsors and participants for an interesting few days!