Creating Connections Wiki

After reading the article TechEssence.info, I decided that I would attempt to set up a conference planning wiki for the British Columbia Association of Teachers of Modern Languages to use to plan and organize their annual conference. I am the Co-Conference chair this year and have been the Conference Chair or Co-Chair of the annual conference for the last 4 years. The committee is made of five people. Although the majority of the people live in the lower mainland, one member lives on the island and I live in northern B.C. Our conference usually takes place in the lower mainland, however the 2010 conference will be held in Kelowna. We are trying to keep our meeting costs down and I thought that a Conference Wiki may help.
In the article, Meridith Farkas writes ”Wikis are an ideal tool for harvesting the collective intelligence. Wiki is web based, easy to set up, and allows people with little tech-savvy to add information.” This quote fits the conference committee to a tea. We want to be able to collect and share information with each other, plus some of our members do not feel comfortable using computers or technology. A Wiki allows people to collaboratively develop a Web site with no Web programming knowledge. Any member of the community can add to or edit the work of others”. This is exactly what we need!!!!

I am one of those technologically challenged members of the community, but I am willing to try to set up a wiki. I have decided to use Wikispaces for my first attempt at a wiki. When I was researching wikis for my discussion topic last week, I noticed that most teachers seemed to use Wikispaces and that one of the reasons I picked this site. Also, Wikispaces.com provides some tutorial which I hope will help me along my journey.

This week I started building the Wiki, but have not gotten very far with it. Thus far I have set the page up and given our group a title. I plan to first show the wiki to my co-chair and the BCATML president to see what they think. I will add them to the wiki and the three of us can hopefully experiment with it by having some discussions about the happenings of the conference.

Eventually, all the members of the Conference Committee will be added. Hopefully, we will arrive at a time when we can do some “…collaborative editing of a document or the creation of a knowledge base.” The people who are on the BCATML executive and the Conference Committee will not be there forever and perhaps this Wiki will be able to help future executives and committees.