Big IDEA

Support wiki revisited

10 August 2004

I have been wanting to respond to James’s take on my Blackboard support wiki idea. He writes about the issues he has with an institution taking the initiative to develop help documents:

1. why? Why doesn’t the EMS (Evil Management System–my feeble attempt at a google bomb, :P) provide this?
2. what do you do when you’re forced to upgrade in 6 months and everything has changed? All of your help docs become obsolete.

I cannot argue with either of those points. Nevertheless, we (Zane State) need something for our students and faculty, and if EMS won’t provide it we’ll have to.

James also suggests that the best use for tikiwiki for students is to use the forums/rss feeds/email updates. This is true and more what I had in mind anyway. If I do create howto-type content in the wiki, the main thing I’m looking forward to is users having the ability to add to or edit it, and comment on it. I also like the idea that you can fairly easily link from page to page within the system.