Earlier this month I had the rare opportunity to introduce a group of education professionals to the wiki. I wanted to see if some might want to use TrueNorth to help develop a professional resource and generate support for classroom innovations. The reaction I got was interesting - and is prompting me to refocus my vision for the website.

Of the 30-40 people who listened to me there were maybe 5 who knew something about blogging. Nobody knew anything about wikis or even Wikipedia. Clearly, we needed more time for concept development, but that time wasn’t available. Confusion in the computer lab had a technical as well as a social dimension. Technical problems involved logging in and creating user pages, links, etc. Socially, comments seemed to have gotten confused with email. People seemed to have more or less enjoyed themselves, but I doubt that they found anything of value in it. I’m grateful for the time they gave me, because I learned a lot.

(NOTE: To anyone who may have participated in one of those meetings and is reading this, I am trying to understand and explain what happened so that I can make the site more useful to teachers. Feedback would be valuable!)

I hoped that the wiki would be simple enough so that barriers to contributing would be perceived as minimal. But without a norm for online authoring among teachers, people will need time to become familiar with new media. Stephen Downes discussed community creation earlier this year, and he points out that community is more than just a place or a site, it’s a network. The wiki can only become part of a potential network - not the network itself. My role with TrueNorth is to explore its potential for value - to myself and others - and treat it like a notebook.

Now there is a list of “users” who I suspect will not return to the wiki. I’ve given the issue of what to do with inactive users some thought in the last few weeks. I don’t want to simply delete the accounts they have entered into the database. But I also don’t want to leave their names and pages on the users page if they are not using the wiki. The simplest way to remedy the situation right now is to include some guidelines in a policy statement, and then create a new category called InactiveUsers. I can very simply change the category tag on those user pages. Any users categorized as inactive are invited to change the category tag on their page if they choose to contribute to the wiki.