Personal satisfaction of contributing to wikis

In reflecting on the past school year, one of the activities that has given me the most personal satisfaction is collaborating and creating in wikis. I started doing this to get a more authentic, first-hand view of the community aspect of these tools. I've contributed to Wikipedia (obvious, since this is the mother of all wikis), Wikimedia Commons (copyleft photos, movies, and music....a great personal tool for me as I've fallen in love with making mini-movies), Wikitravel (since I travel a lot), Wikibooks ("open content textbooks"....interesting), and a few others.

Overall, it's been a really great experience. It's easy to participate; I've made some new friends and learned a ton. Most importantly, I feel like I'm contributing to something that people all over the world can use.

I am increasingly becoming an advocate for "copyleft" content licensing. Having taught in a place where we had almost no educational resources, the potential of these tools is mind boggling. (The OLPC project seems to be depending on these as a major source of content.) I also think that textbooks are on the way out as a useful resource, and that technology is one of the best tools we have for differentiating instruction. What better way to do this than by sharing our collective wisdom via free open educational resources (not to mention the fact that collaborating on creating these resources is a good way to develop new information literacy skills for both ourselves and our students)?

If you haven't contributed to a wiki, why not try it? You might even want to make it a class project. An easy way to start is to pick a topic you know a lot about and look it up on Wikipedia. Chances are there will be something you can add or correct in the article you find there. Just correcting a misspelling or grammar mistake adds to the quality. From there, the sky's the limit.

I would love to see more teachers involved in helping create Wikijunior books, books intended for kids aged 8-11. (Unfortunately, many of the collaborators there don't have a lot of educational experience and don't always know what's "child appropriate" in terms of language level and concept load.) There are currently books in process on the human body, dinosaurs, South America, ancient civilizations, World War II, and more. You can also start your own book.

Here is a list of other educational curriculum-oriented wikis. Why not post your own favorite original lesson plan or resource and share it with the world?

The more we all participate, the better these resources will be. Information should be free, and the more everyone participates, the better the quality will be.