Week Three Response

Week 3

What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment? How would they support learning and/or performance? What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?

In my work environment I could see several different uses for a wiki or even a blog. The first use I could envision would be a question and answer board that employees could post to and receive responses fairly quickly that could be seen effectively by lots of employees at the same time. The responses would not have to be the domain of a single SME, but could be communally policed(?)by several SME's that are located in different parts of the region(From Pensacola, Fl to Monticello, Fl).

This would support learning by sharing the same answers with staff instead of answering each question individually, and possibly having different answers disseminated for the same question. This would also reinforce their knowledge of their jobs, policies and procedures.

The second one could be aimed at new employees who go through training and would allow them to remain connected to each other as they are disbursed to service sites. This would allow them a sense of community that they developed in the classroom, a safety net or security blanket approach that will reinforce what they have learned both in the classroom and on the job.

The challenges of applying this at my workplace are the effective closed intranet that we use and gaining permission to use space on the intranet to do so. Outside usage of the internet is restricted to breaks/lunch times, and staff may not wish to use break time to work on the job blogging or wiki posts. So administrative issues and infrastructure policies may collide in this effort.