True, I haven’t updated the wiki I created for teaching in a while, but it has an archive of all of the online work I did with my students from 2006 (when I got brave and started it) through 2011-12. My students even wrote choose your own adventures through the Colonies and the Revolutionary War and explored how the Internet would have changed Lewis and Clark’s expedition using Wikispaces. Fast forward to yesterday. I started a new wiki to use with our grad students at Concordia University and when I went to update it this morning, I saw the sad news: Wikispaces is closing. Now on my spring break list is figuring out how best to archive whatever I would like to keep as examples, reminders, etc.
I know there are some other wiki resources out there. PBworks (long ago, it was called PBWiki and my students used it to make a wiki about China, it was our first ever digital collaborative project). PowerSchool Learning (formerly Haiku) has a WikiProject feature, it looks like Miraheze might be another free wiki option, and I suppose the new Google Sites could be used like a wiki.
Wikis have been around for a while (here’s Common Craft’s Wiki in Plain English from 2007) but they are a great tool for promoting collaboration in a low-floor, high-ceiling type of way. Wikispaces was a great, teacher-friendly webtool that students found easy to use. I will miss them.
No Time to Sleep 