My experience (and I do have some actual experience with wikis at our school) has been that teachers like wikis simply because it allows them to easily make new pages and add content.

Like everything else, it would take a constant push to get people to actually use a wiki consistently. It would pretty much need to be someone’s job…

Wikis also take a lot of gardening. Constant pruning and reorganizing. That also needs to be someone’s job.

The collaborative aspect of wikis is conceptually difficult for teachers to grasp and dicey in the political structure of a school. At best you end up with inline comments, which ultimately have to be edited into the text of discarded by the gardener.

The more I read about Wikis, the more I know at some point I’m going to have to take the plunge. But I think what’s making me hesitate more than anything else is that I keep thinking about how to implement one with teachers at school, and so the big question becomes if teachers won’t blog, will they wiki? On one hand, I think maybe they will. The collaborative, working to produce a useable resource aspect of wikis does have its appeal. No pressure on one person, collective experience and knowledge, free sharing of product…all of those things are selling points. And the potential to use it in the classroom is clear, but if you think people have concerns about blogs and kids… And, all of this comes down to a time issue for most. I guess I’m just going to have to recruit some volunteers and dive in at some point.

Kairosnews points to an interesting observation by Glyn Moody about the future of wikis and blogs:

The seriousness and high quality of the Wikipedia entries emphasise the main strength of Wikis: a depth born of multiple authors working together to hone material. This contrasts with the blog, which shines in its ability to offer one person’s quirky and brilliant insights across what may be a vast and often contrasting spectrum of subjects. (For those who want the best of blogs and Wikis, there is also the Bloki hybrid.)

Both undoubtedly have their place in the online ecosystem, but the underlying dynamics that drive a Wiki seem likely to ensure that it will prove more enduring…

I think that articulates the professional potential pretty well.
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(via George Siemens) This appears to be a list written by Stephen Downes a few years ago that I hadn’t seen before but has some interesting context for Weblogs. I think there’s only one of the rules that isn’t applicable, namely a lack of standardization.
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