WaterWiki - this looks amazing
Via Dorine Rüter I learned of an online course for online facilitation in international development. By following links, I stumbled upon what looks to be a beautiful use of a wiki for an online course that is based on the participants making meaning together, supported by resource materials. In my head I thought "wow, someone put a lot of work and love into this."
The wiki looks to be the glue that held together texts, links to other activites and games, and I'm guessing there might have been an email list or web based discussion associated with the course. (If anyone reading this knows, please, tell us!)
The workshop appears to be sponsored by MyNetworks. It is not clear that they offer all their courses on wikis, as their main platform looks to be a more traditional web based bulletin board/library system.
There were a number of resources used, but they did not always cite their sources, something that is on my radar screen these days. How do we acknowledge the good things we use and reuse from both our communities and the larger world (thanks to the 'net). I want to be accountable when I use others' materials and hope they would do the same. So as I prepare other online faciltiation workshops, do I ask permission to use their materials? What if some are unreferenced? This also reminds me of the value of shared repositories. Mamma mia! 
The workshop wiki is embedded as part of a larger effort, the WaterWiki. Again, some really cool wiki work. I'm lovin' it! It has maps integration, some beautiful use of images and icons, a nice clean design. I would love to know more about those who tend this wiki and those who use it. Labor of love, I suspect.
As I continue to think about tools for teaching this upcoming workshop I'm doing with Bev, it is SO useful to be able to see examples. We build ideas and concepts in our heads, but it is in practice that things really come alive.
posted by Nancy White at 4:29 PM
2 Comments:
Hi, and thanks for your compliments!
I was part of the team who worked on the WaterWiki project, covering the technical stuff. You're right, it was a labor of love :)
You can read a bit about who and what went into this pilot in the Toolkit
http://europeandcis.undp.org/WaterWiki/index.php/WaterWiki_Toolkit
My own collected thoughts on the project
http://brainoff.com/weblog/index.php?s=undp
Cheers,
Mikel
Dear Nancy,
thanks a lot for your very positive feedback on the e-moderation Wiki. The Wiki was set up as a participants' project during a 4-week online e-moderation course, held mainly on mynetworks.org from mid-March to mid-April of this year (2006). So the real credits are belonging to that working group.
I think I should anyway say a few words about the course: It was run by Gabriela Renggli and myself, from the two organizations Agridea (Switzerland) and mynetworks.org (Switzerland/Netherlands). The course was not sponsored by anyone and was carried only by the course fees of the participants.
Pedagogically, we followed the 5-step model of Gilly Salmon, starting rather low-key with warming-up activities and then gradually increasing the intensity of interaction in the first two weeks. The weeks 3 and 4 were focussed on project ideas the participants brought with them. E.g., in the Wiki's case, one participant was already involved with the WaterWiki. The second working group produced the learning game you also made a link to.
As part of the course approach, the participants were asked to step in as sub-group moderators starting from the beginning. So in the end, most of them had the chance to gather hands-on experience in moderating.
mynetworks.org served as main course environment, (supported by a few live audio meetings on Interwise as the second important element). As you had guessed, it is a rather "traditional" web environment (funny to speak of traditional in a field that is not older than a decade...), meaning that it provides a few selected functionalities (chat, discussion forum, library, a few others) that will work reasonably well even under low-connectivity conditions.
mynetworks was chosen simply because I co-developed it, but it fits well with Gabriela's and my core idea: that the choice of tools is only a means for good e-moderation and should be considered as secondary. Consequently, in our course, various other tools were used, too (libe audio, email, Skype, discussion fora, telephone calls, the Wiki...)
Coming back to the Wiki, the group chose to continue it and will also continue to be active as a group. Thus, I think with time the Wiki will improve and eventually issues like referencing the sources correctly will be solved. Which is a valid issue - I perfectly agree with you.
Cheers from Lucerne, Switzerland
Andreas
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