The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog
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Have Wikis Run Out of Steam?
By Brock Read
Just a few years ago, it seemed nearly everyone, in academe and out, was hailing the wiki as the next great transformative technology — or, at the very least, a tool worth getting a bit excited about. Fast forward to 2009, though, and much of the enthusiastic talk has died down.
So says Renay San Miguel in an article for Linux Insider, and he’s got something of a point. Wikipedia aside, there really aren’t many heavily hyped wiki projects, and social-networking tools like Facebook and Twitter seem to have stolen the spotlight. So Mr. San Miguel wants to know: “Have wikis lost their mojo?”
It’s worth noting that plenty of wiki-friendly concepts and innovations have been absorbed into other formats, as anyone who’s participated in group editing via Google Docs can attest. But there are other reasons that wikis never took the world by storm, according to some analysts. “I always thought they were the nerdiest of the social tools,” says one social-media guru, “and the one that requires the most established … oversight.”
On most college campuses, though, nerdiness is hardly in short supply. So here’s a question: Are wikis finding a place at colleges even if the business world has lost interest? Are professors still talking about what they can do with wikis, or have they moved on to social networks and other Web 2.0 tools? —Brock Read
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