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That Canadian Factor- Maricopans are Asking About Wikis and RSS

Okay, maybe we've gushed a bit already, but something has happened here in our system. I think it is the Canadian aura, but after Brian Lamb's Dialogue Day with us last week, people are now popping out of the ground like prairie dogs, and seeing a beautiful wheat filled plain of lovely information technologies...

We'd published internally before on RSS (Fall 2003) and wikis (Fall 2004) without much of a measurable ripple. But already in a few days:

(1) Our Blackboard admin has seen how Feed2JS and RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange can be used to pipe content from our Blackboard Support materials MLX collection into a Bb site for the staff around our system that use/support Blackboard:

Yeah, this is not exactly new or earth shattering, but they went and did it on their own.

(2) Another group is using a new open wiki (unspecified, sorry) for creating a place for their People Soft Portal team to do some brainstorming.

(3) We convinced a few folks who attended this week's NMC Online oCnference on Visual Literacy to use a wiki to declare which sections they would review and to post some notes. We were able to send up to 10 people from our system to this conference, and at our first suggestion to use a wiki to collaborate, there was silence and an offer from one leader to have everyone "email their notes so he can blog them". I snuck ahead and created the wiki site, and that turned the bulbs on for the group. Maybe-- it appears that only 3 of the 10 actually got their fingers in the wiki. But we'll take any bits of progress we can get.

(4) And emails like this:

Dave _______ has been looking at the MLX section of the mcli site and had incorporated some of it for Blackboard.

He had an idea of possible doing something similar and harnessing the power of RSS for our Peoplesoft SIS Project web site.

Where can I find out more about how this works, what we would need to do to get it going, and some ideas on how to implement this?
 

We might be getting some traction finally in these technologies that to me, have budded passed "emerging".

So if you are struggling in your system to get some adoption, bring in a Canadian!