Faculty Meeting Wiki

I have been experimenting with wikispaces for our faculty meetings this year. One of our objectives is to update our goals for knowledge, skills, and values we want our students to develop by the time they graduate.

It was my desire that perhaps we could do without much of our meeting time by letting faculty members participate and give input to brainstorms and collaboration asynchronously-- that is on their own time. When I introduced the concept, I could see how many were willing to give it a try, and I was optimistic. I did give faculty meeting time during our first meeting for groups of faculty to brainstorm, and as we concluded, we had definitions, links to resources, embedded videos. There was excitement in the air. As we go into our next long meeting, however, there has been little input by our teachers, and I feel very deflated. As I reflect on what happened, here is what I think needs to be improved:

1) I wanted faculty to work together, but once they grouped, only one actually recorded on the wiki. That means that most were not able to see easy text entry and uploading is. Now that I am asking them to do it on their own, they do not feel comfortable with wikis.

2) There is still a reluctance to using the term wiki. Even with definitions, resources, examples, and videos, the term "wiki" is hard for some to take seriously and justify use with each other and with students. I should probably say it is just web page editing, even though they should know and use this tool for learning, communication, and collaboration. Many, however, were here when we thought HTML and later wysiwyg editors, again to some unsatisfactory results. Some of us saw the great possibilities of hypertext even 10-12 years ago. Only three of us continued to create web pages. Will wikis go the way of the html editors of the past? I don't know, but I am impressed when I give the format to my students, and how familiar they are with wikis whether they know exactly what they are doing or not. Is it too much of a paradigm shift for adults, espcially older ones?

3) The last major obstacle is what I was trying to alleviate--TIME. There is not enough time for faculty not only to learn new tools but most importantly not enough time to play. I hear more frustration about not wanting to use the tool, no time to get on, no time to edit. Really? No time to pull up a web page and edit a sentence or a word perhaps? I have written about this earlier, but we are more comfortable in the bubble of our own classrooms. Moreover, how can we find the time to learn about and use the tools.