Dr Coop and “What Can You Do With a Wiki?”

I had fun this afternoon helping in a wiki workshop at South Mountain Community College. “Dr Coop” is Alisa Cooper, a gem of an English teacher who pretty much tries and finds almost every new technology- in a thoughtful and effective manner. She got turned onto PBWiki last year and has been using it extensively with her first year composition students- but she dabbles also in 2 other hosted wiki places, several blogs, Writely, YouTube, and like 10 more I am forgetting.

Today she led a “What Can You Do With a Wiki?” Workshop:

which, of course, was a workshop on wikkis, that used a wiki for the workshop. Get it? She does: http://drcoop.pbwiki.com/

it’s been a few weeks since I’d been in PBWiki, and they keep adding cool new features. She paid the fee for the upgrade version, which gives you discussion areas on all pages, the ability to lock pages, and access to usage statistics. And along the way, I picked up a bag of Web X.0 tools I had never seen or used-

* StickiPad a hosted wiki that offers a spreadsheet like functionality
* Meebo a browser tool that allows you to run chats in AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, all in one interface. Slick. Nothing to do with wikis, but slick.
* SeedWiki which I had heard of but never bothered to look- it has a full featured WYSIWIG editor which frees people from needing the bizarre wikis formatting codes which are never the same from wiki to wiki

And check out the ways Dr. Coop has used Wikis:

* English 101 Book Selection
* ENG101: Freshman Composition Wiki — used for classroom content presentation, student peer review, and posting of student writing; see the “Unit Projects” as well as the ones from fall 2005
* Deer Valley HS Track Team Wiki – ideally the coaches would post info about the events they support– “This is the team wiki for a local high school. The other coaches haven’t caught on to it yet, but the student athletes love it.” (The Dr is also an athlete and coach- she even finds time to run marathons!)

She is one of these faculty us IT folks dream to work with, and I will miss her after I am gone April 7– keep on pushing all the envelopes, Dr. Coop!