Wikis and Emergent Roles for Teaching and Learning

I'm here at the Educause Western Regional Conference, putting the final touches on my presentation about wikis and best practices for a panel discussion today at 11:45. I will definitely want to mention that a wiki enabled me and two others from another institution (Occidental College), to put this together. Initially, we were contacted by Educause, to see if we wanted to combine our presentations, since they were so similar. Actually, that doesn't surprise me, since wikis are becoming more and more mainstream. And people want to know more about them.

Maybe it's the name, maybe it's the buzz, but whatever it is, people are finally catching up to this technology that has been around since 1995. Yes, they weren't as user-friendly as they now are and the web has certainly changed from a one-way interaction to multiple ways to interact, but still, they HAVE been around and yet people just didn't seem that interested.

Now they are VERY interested, and I'm hoping that we get a good turnout for our discussion. However, we ARE in San Francisco and the shopping here is VERY irresistible. Take a look at my pictures on flickr.com if you have any doubts about this: http://flickr.com/search/?q=educause_wrc08&w=all

If you want to read my paper, you can either go to our collaborative wiki or here's a direct link: http://wikipanel.pbwiki.com/f/withinthewiki.pdf