Thank you for having taken a look at the LTD Project Wiki, as well as for your suggestion to bring it over to WikiEducator (… [author's name removed {PB}], personal correspondence …, Nov 21, 2009). While I haven’t assessed WikEducator in these terms before, you’re right; the community members, and especially people like you there, have a great deal of experience and expertise to offer. I appreciate the reminder. People using WikiEducator are a wonder to behold. …

And ending like this:

… I’m afraid that reasons for not following your suggestion, including a horrendous learning curve, outweigh currently perceivable benefits from porting one of many wikis over to WikiEducator.

On one hand, as you may know, I’m involved with several wikis in Wikispaces, the interface of which I find visually appealing, intuitive, and user-friendly enough for low-intermediate students of English as an additional language to use in the target language. Those wikis are in addition to a DokuWiki, MediaWikis, pbWikis, pmWikis, and a bit of dabbling in Zoho Wiki, too. In general, I’ve found developers at Wikispaces responsive to inquiries and suggestions.

On the other, the invitation I’d received precipitated wonder whether a massive translocation of wiki content from one engine to another would be feasible and easy, or better yet automated and reliable. A quick and dirty approach, I thought, would be to plant an RSS feed in a user page on WikiEducator, at least temporarily, to display content from selected wikis and blogs.

However, even after racking up years of experience with wikis, and having audited several introductory workshops about WikiEducator, I find MediaWikis hard to fathom, and WikiEducator – in particular – frustrating to attempt to navigate, understand, and use. For example, I opened a user page to edit it (still thinking of quickly planting an aggregate RSS feed over there), but running short on time could find no cancel option.

I thought a prominent “dismiss” link might do the job, but something else disappeared when I activated that. I searched for “dismiss,” and have found nothing so far except no “search” help on the Help:Contents page or All pages (Help namespace). Though the Practice editing page refers and links to “the user manual” (P.S.2), that link leads straight back to Help:Contents.

A circuitous and fruitless foray like that into WikiEducator suggests that its wiki engine[, search engine,] and the collaborative venues in flux or stagnating around it (e.g.: WikiEducator policies, “Work in progress … last modified October 4, 2008″) may be too complex for comfort, too cluttered for practical use with English-as-an-additional-language learner collaborators, and too convoluted to unravel and reweave in what little time I have. I feel that, for the time being, the wiki pages I continue to develop, or to [archive or] disregard … [and allow to stagnate] as the case may be, are fine where they are.

1. Capture their attention;
2. Convince them to care;
3. Motivate them to change;
4. Give them choices;
5. Connect them with community;
6. Induce them to participate;
7. Enable opportunities to contribute; [and]
8. Make it an experience to remember.

That’s a tall order that I want to reflect upon further, possibly after tracking down details of Wagner’s presentation.

A community, on one hand, she suggests is “an online group where one’s absence will be noted (you will be missed).” In contrast, she suggests, a network is “an online group where one’s absence does not matter (the group will survive)” (Learning Times, Virtual Community Working Group, 2005.04.06).

Reading that led to wondering whether the WinK network is beginning to approximate a community. [Somehow, this quick post got clocked in on January 1, 1970. Since I don't recall when I posted it, I'm changing the timestamp to today (March 19, 2008).]

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Tags: communities, LearningTimes, networks, online, virtual