Building Rich Communities with Wikis

Stewart Mader and John Willinsky separately discussed how we imagine the wiki in new and powerful ways. Stewart Mader did an excellent job of giving an overview of re-conceptualizing the wiki space as a collaborative, distributed publishing platform, while John Willinsky gave a pointed example of how wikis are informing the way his classes create, organize, and share their experience as student teachers. His classes have created an on-going repository of lesson plans for K-12 teachers using this wiki -a brilliantly conceived framework for the knowledge management that a well-organized wiki is so good at. Moreover, the community is centered around building professional and personal resource for thinking, learning, and teaching. Willinksy is also a part of the Public Knowledge Project that highlights open access -so much here in relationship to the vision of open source and an intelligent use of the tools.