[I drafted a long post about this a while ago, inspired by the alliteration and the Beastie Boys, but never posted it – this is an abbreviated version]
A while back it seemed Wikis were the answer to many of our ills – breaking down the barriers of web design, enabling creation of knowledge bases, an easy way to capture tacit and crowd-sourced content.
Social media and mobile, and MOOCs in HE, seem to have stolen the thunder of Wikis in more recent times. Wikis indeed have probably just become a standard tool amongst the suite available to educators, knowledge managers and other professionals. Their flexibility however means they remain a tool with huge potential.
It is then of interest to see the launch of Wikispaces Classroom a few weeks back – a wiki combining tools (such as ‘Projects’) to effectively build a LMS out of a long standing (as Web 2.0 tools go) product. The below video introduces Classroom and does mention (toward the end) how it might be seen as LMS-lite functionality.
Seems like a great example of a c.2005 buzz tool evolving but maintaining their original spirit [well Wikipedia says it launched then so that was a good guess]. In my old role I maintained a departmental knowledge base on Wikispaces (my handover was effectively just a case of tidying this site up) – compare that to Rypple (that I used for feedback/ratings/team management in that role) which has now evolved to Work.com within the Salesforce suite and you get two quite different models of online tools evolutions.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 