Wiki's strength is as a tool for shared thinking in which the focus is on the development of your own personal experience and understanding, but to do this with the support and collaboration of other minds.
Here we explore wiki and other tools in this area. First let's look at the experience of a new user:
From Pam
I begin to understand that at present wiki is a tool for authors to communicate with authors. It is not for authors to communicate with readers. I had imagined that was its purpose. I thought it enabling authors to create a mixture of their own original content and content adapted from the work of other authors in a way that made the various sources obvious to all.
If authors can't communicate with readers from this platform yet then what is the point of writing here?
I can see it could be a powerful shared-thinking tool. I see that from the viewpoint of collaboration based on my involvement in FEAST. That collaboration began in February as a "one day a week" thing, and has extended in its time allocation since then. I'm thinking of all the people I'm meeting who are connected with FEAST and I'm imagining more of them becoming wiki authors to help us collaborate more effectively.
If the only readers are other authors, and if those authors are collaborators then wiki becomes a tool for tossing ideas back and forth, and building on the work of each other for a shared purpose.
If it is to be useful like that, then the requirement and priorities for developing the experience of wiki change.
Development and collaboration
If the main purpose of wiki is to serve as a tool for creative thinking and collaboration then it must be welcoming for a team of collaborators. In the example of developing FEAST this means people with many different skills and aptitudes. These content creators aren't just people like me (authoring written content). They are people with a huge range of talents who are creative with multi media.
If the present focus and prime purpose of wiki is to enable collaborative development of ideas and activities then making the experience of authors easier becomes a higher priority.
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