What's Your Wiki Bringing?

There is too much information around for anyone to read all of it. This is why numerous tools have emerged to help people manage, organize, classify, filter and sort information. RSS has been a great step towards personal information independance, allowing individuals greater freedom as to what heir informations sources could be and how often new data was made available.

Breathing Through

Even the best RSS reader will not prevent one from feeling overwhelmed by bits of information. Social news rating websites have stepped in to help people go a bit further and order and give meaning to information together. Digg, Wikio, Newsvine are as many examples of ways to sort information. Wikipedia has done a great job to bring the right information to the right place for the people who are looking after it, or at least it does so most of the time.

Going Further

However, even with the help of those tools irrelevant information keeps popping out most of the time. Could this be avoided? Probably not. Could this be reduced a bit more? Certainly. Interactions between people about blog articles could be centralized for a group in one place to let them discuss and share it more easily. This is exactly what a product like XWiki Watch is aiming at doing, providing a team with a place where it will be able to share information and enrich it collaboratively.

Staying Ahead

The right question however is, why are all those information flows so important? Because, in today's world, information provides you with an advantage over your competitors. It has amways done so, but something changed recentlty: the speed at which relevant data can be exploited. A factory can be built quicker than ever before. Companies have to remain reactive not to get out of touch with their customer bases. A wiki provides a tool to let you communicate with the people who buy your products. Somehow, in their collective knowledge lies the products you will be offering them tomorrow. Isn't that worth a try?


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis and e-learning

Thought to become a revolution in the way we teach and learn, e-learning has not yet achieved its full potential. This is due to a lack of understanding of the way people do actually learn. Using a wiki instead of traditional e-learning tools does make a difference. Not convinced yet?

How we do not learn

We (assuming that here "we" refers to us all human beings) do not learn by staring blankly at blackboards. We did not do at school, and we do not either while staring blankly at webpages. We do not learn either by reading ill-written content served in an ill-conceived fashion by a Flash applet. Last but not least, we do not learn while interacting with silly pre-programmed answers offered by a computer, however clever its programmer think they have been.

How we do learn

We learn through our active interaction with people and problems. We learn while we experience interest in the subject of which mastering we are pursuing. We learn when an emotional transfer occurs during the studying process. Which part of your physics 101 course do you remember today: the textbook readings or the fuzzy chemical reactions in the labs? This is what learning is all about: interest for the topic and self-involvement in the learning process.

Learning through a wiki

A wiki offers a platform for clever learning together. The interaction with other people (human beings, not machines) provides us with feedback and new insights. There is additional motivation too, created as a byproduct from the involvement within a community of peers and of area of interest. You do not feel the same emotional bonds for a computer than for other people (At the very least I assume most people do not). There is an acknowledgment of oneself as an human being worth of being talked, discussed and spent time with in the process too.

The core issue? The structure of contemporary e-learning does not match the way we do learn. Inversely, a wiki goes in the right direction since it promotes learning through interaction.


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC