With the help of my colleague in Adminstrative Computing, Josh Peluso, I’ve set up a wiki in SUNY Cortland webspace (http://web.cortland.edu/wiki).

My intention is to use the wiki in my courses in the fall and to encourage my colleagues to do the same. However, I also recognize that my intentions will not count for much, or at least I hope they don’t. If they do, then that means very few people are making use of the site.

I also hope that the site will be used broadly by Cortland students, faculty, and staff. However, that hope has made at least some folks on campus a little nervous. As such, I toned down some of the rhetoric on the home page inviting people to join in. Of course, there are no technical barriers that prevent anyone from making edits or adding new pages, so regardless of the rhetoric, the wiki remains as open as ever.

Anyway, the idea is NOT to create an "official" wiki (the idea of official and wiki don’t go together very well in my view). On the other hand, I’m not intending to create some kind of "underground’ wiki either (it’s as public as any other site). It’s just a wiki. Users add material if they want, edit material if they want, or just read it.

Interestingly, a few weeks back, I was at a presentation where the subject of Facebook came up, and our college president raised the possibility of creating some college venue that would attract students away from Facebook. Most of us agreed that, for good or bad, that wasn’t likely. I don’t think a wiki like this could replace Facebook; they are really different types of applications. However, a Cortland wiki would have the potential of creating an open online community where learning activities from different courses blended with one another and with the interests and goings-on of the community beyond academics.

A year from now, I’ll have a much better idea of how this works.

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