Birthday week: Happy birthday to YOU

In a way, it’s not just us turning five this week. Sure, we set the table, but you guys brought the cake. The way we see it, this is your birthday, too.

So we talked to some people who’ve seen us through a few birthdays: Vicki Davis, one of the founders of Flat Classroom, has been with us since 2005, and Dan Beeby, an educational technologist at Columbia University, has been with us since 2007.

“The keys to our future as a human race lie in the untapped potential of true, ethical, meaningful collaboration,” says Vicki. And that’s what we’ve seen, in these five years: people bridging distances, bringing nation to nation, classroom to classroom, tying plan to execution and the past to the future. As Dan points out, in higher education they’re even breaking down silos between semesters: “It’s easy to carry one semester to the next, just by renaming the wiki. So the original work the students have done isn’t lost forever in a course management system.” Without all those barriers, so many things are suddenly possible. The horizon is closer, and it’s broader than ever.

And that’s the thing, really. It’s not just that your work keeps us going: it’s that the ways you work challenge and inspire us. A few people who’ve done some truly excellent things in the past year (or more) told us what they’re up to. We bet you’ll think their wikis are as cool as we do.

TheScienceClassroom

Among other things, Jody Bowie’s high school students are actually writing their own textbook. Their work is visible to the public, so you really should check it out, and let Jody know that he’s managed to bring “new meaning to the idea of teaching students to ‘consider their audience’ when writing:”

I see this project as a way for students to begin to create an online portfolio. In fact, I had a student who wanted to know if she “could use the wiki project to show her previous writing work” for a summer workshop in which she was participating. I said, “of course!”

Mr. Bruce’s History

Two and a half years ago, Larry Bruce decided to give his 9th and 10th grade social studies students a more global perspective on collaboration along with a solid education in U.S. History. With student portfolios, a classroom calendar, and a posted curriculum, he’s done just that:

From small-scale partner assignments (Inaugural Addresses) to larger collaborative tasks where students worked with classmates from other class periods asynchronously (The Big Kahuna), our wiki was a place to publish. Simply put, our wiki WORKS for us. As my students mastered introductory elements and uses, I kept reinventing how we (collectively) employed the platform.

Genefish

Steven Roberts, Assistant Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, wanted to share science. So he gave his students a place to keep their lab notebooks online:

We use it for almost all aspects of our research activities including protocols, location of resources, and general communication. One key aspect is that all members maintain an electronic lab notebook using Wikispaces. This allows everyone (including the public) to follow what we are doing in real-time.

Garmin Oregon

Complicated devices like the Garmin Oregon outdoor handheld GPS device can be confusing. To help, Scott Dresser created a community that acts as a reference space and a forum for Garmin Oregon owners.

Integration with a wide range of media types is one thing that I like about Wikispaces; support for different kinds of media, file downloads, and video helps a lot when you are trying to present information to new users. Since I have multiple wikis and a related WordPress blog, one thing I wanted was an integrated search function using Google custom search. Wikispaces custom templates allowed me to easily integrate a search function that searches results across all of my sites and returns relevant results.

Some closing thoughts

It’s exciting, this birthday thing. Because, as far as we’ve come, there are always more challenges, and better ways of looking at things — and we’re learning about that through you.

At Columbia, Dan tells us, they’re constantly finding new and better ways to work with the wikis on their Private Label site. “It’s an iterative cycle. We assess what the instructor is looking for and make suggestions. We expose the weaknesses or strengths, then make changes the next time.” And, whether you’re working in a university, or a school district, or a company or non-profit, or just building a community around the things that you’re passionate about, it’s been exciting for us to watch you do just that.

And now we’ll let Vicki drive it home, because she really says it better than we ever could:

I wish Wikispaces a heartfelt happy birthday for their fifth year. In the five years with Wikispaces, they continue to respond and grow and help us press forward to the true collaborative editing environment that has become the gold standard of what we do in the Flat Classroom projects. We create and we collaborate and that is also what Wikispaces does.

Thank you, Vicki, Dan, Jody, Larry, Steve, and Scott. And thank you, too, to all the rest of you out there, for all the amazing things you’ve done in these last five years. Happy birthday, from all of us to all of you.

Let us know what you’re doing with your wiki or Private Label site: help@wikispaces.com.