This shows my current thinking about a way forward for wikis at the polytechnic. I’ll test it with some colleagues, project team members and through the student evaluation coming up.

Draft recommendations

1. A combination of external and self-hosted wiki pages will give the following benefits:
   Branding and online presence as a leader in Open and Connected Learning.
   Participation in a wider, global community of educators and learners.
   Support with technical issues and ongoing maintenance. and so on
2. Teachers use Wikiversity/WikiEducator to create and host their learning materials. Student group and collaborative work is also done on Wikiversity/WikiEducator.
3. All materials from the Category “TasPoly” to be mirrored on a Polytechnic hosted wiki.  This builds in risk management as well as raising our profile in the global education community.
4. A blog platform for learners and teachers to be hosted by the Polytechnic. Support also given to those staff and students for a limited range of externally hosted services eg Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Edublogs…
5. Staff and learners supported to use RSS readers to streamline accessing information from multiple points. This can be achieved through Outlook and/or Google Reader.
6. Policy will support teachers releasing learning materials through a Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike licence.

Comments welcomed!