Wiki Replaces Personal Document Storage

I was interviewed on the webcasted EdTechTalk show last month about the used of wikis in education. The show's hosts, Alex and Arvind, are great guys and it was fun to participate in this new form of media which feels a lot like radio on demand. The guys' demeanor remind me of Click and Clack on CarTalk [I hope they take this as the high compliment it is intended as]. At any rate, we had a nice chat and explored a few wikis, but I forgot to mention one area of wiki use which is most intriguing...

In my everyday work I am finding that I am much more interested and motivated to save my informational documents onto a wiki page as opposed to into my personal computer's "My Documents" folder. I'm very involved in the SchoolComputing wiki and also an eLearning wiki which my Hopkins' class created. I'm now finding that when I want to save a document during my normal day's work, I want to put it on the wiki, not in my personal files. The reasons are multiple... Most importantly I hope others will improve and add to my documents. Beyond that, having it on the wiki means I can get to it from anywhere, I'm hopefully contributing to others' knowledge, I can find it again easily using the "Search" function on the wiki, and I can link among documents easily. As examples, I recently collated some ideas that flowed in from a list-serv I'm on about the use of DyKnow software. Rather than saving this collation of ideas as a Word file, I put it on the wiki here. I am also working to adapt my faculty technology competencies document into Alex's page here. I find it fascinating that the wikis are replacing my "My Documents" file storage system. It's changing my understanding of document storage, intellecual property, and collaboration. It's a huge paradigm shift.