I'm always impressed with when our Dean addresses us, but I was particularly interested to hear about Libraries' partnerships and encouraging efficiency mentioned in Dean Eaton's State of the Libraries' Budget presentation. While my own projects were not mentioned, I immediately thought about a personal passion of mine: coordinating training and documentation efforts throughout the University.
While working to provide Libraries' staff with training and documentation, I realized that some of the materials we made available may be of use to a much broader audience. So many of us throughout the University support email, Web browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. So many of our internal customers are asking the same questions. So many of us are creating the same resources over and over. In effect Penn State is paying us to do the same job many, many times over.
I began by sharing this work in our Libraries public Website, but this did not allow departments within the University to comment or edit. When it was decided that staff training would be moved to our Intranet, I still wanted a mechanism for sharing what belonged to the Penn State community while giving our Libraries staff one-stop training, so I created some cross-linking between the PennState Wikispaces Technology Training wiki and the training Intranet site.
This was not my first attempt at sharing on PennState Wikispaces. In the past, I'd create a draft of an item and make it public to invite others to comment or edit. This time, I really wanted to start a grassroots movement among the other training professionals I knew to contribute to a pool of knowledge. We could use tagging and macros to aggregate training across several wikis. I've been working with some of my contacts in ITS Training Services for advice on how to test this idea.
I used my wiki was a proof of concept. I used social media to promote it. The feedback I've gotten from other departments has been great. I've had many people contact me about the idea, thank me for making this training available, ask for advice on how to carry this project forward in their own units, and more.
But it's not just what we get. If they contribute, we can receive as well. Libraries can benefit from their contributions. Penn State benefits by becoming more efficient. Our faculty and staff get one-stop shopping for training and documentation.
I know that Wikispaces is technically still in test. I could have waited for a formal policy or a formal group or process to propose this project. While we wait for the right people to decide that Wikispaces is officially blessed for this use, we are wasting time. The time it takes for decisions by committee and for processes to be implemented versus the speed of technology today. The time that is used by training professionals who want to collaborate and work efficiently.
We are wasting time. Time is money. No matter where we are in the hierarchy, I think it's our place to take the intiative to save Penn State money.
You are so on the right track on this one. As someone who has learned the hard way about the value of technical documentation, I tend to take very copious notes about process when I'm likely to repeat it later. I happen to now do that in a Wiki.
Earlier this week, I saved a colleague in another unit significant time and effort by sharing my notes in my (siloed) wiki with him.
Your post has made me think I should publish those notes (installing Trac and SVN on RHEL with PSU authentication) to Wikispaces for the good of all.
Thanks for commenting, Brian.
Robin Smail and I have a presentation prepped that we are currently without venue to air, but the general philosophy is this:
We should consider what we are doing to be public unless there is some good reason not to. By going the other way around we lose valuable opportunities to collaborate within the University and with other institutions. But it goes deeper than that: Hiding our work promotes an unhealthy air of distrust and of competition.
By the time we realize we need to make our information public, the process for moving the information is too cumbersome.
Nikki
Thanks for your work toward this effort Nikki! When the work we do is for the good of our entire University, why should it be hidden? It's a new, and I think, better way to work - making our work more visible with the opportunity to make it more collaborative and available for continuous improvement. If others can benefit from it, how cool is that?! The faculty development work I've been doing with colleagues around the university is completely open within PSU's wikispaces. I haven't seen the downside of this effort yet, and don't expect to see one. Don't you think this conversation is similar to the discussion around OER?
Carol, you raise a great question.
I think the idea of sharing content with ourselves is absolutely similar to the conversation around OER.
If we can't built a community of trust around between departments, how can we begin to think about OER and opening content to the world (or convincing faculty to do so).
Even Wikispaces itself is currently not accessibly to the public except by FPS account if you set up your space to allow them. At best, that leaves out members of the training community who want to open their content up to the outside world. At worst, that leaves out those of us who serve a community of people who may not have access accounts (extension?).
I know this will come in time and the folks at ET have been absolutely wonderful to work with in giving me some modifications I have asked for in the past. So putting the content out there now was not such a leap of faith for me.
Nikki
P.S. Feel free to share your Wikispaces URL here if you'd like. I would love for those of use who are using Wikispaces this way to share. Eventually I would like to look at some share tagging and aggregation, but until then...
Here's the collaborative space for our current projects.
Yeah, the link would be good, huh? https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/facdev/Home
There are many, many reasons to be sharing our work like this. I act as a trainer for part of my role at the university but I don't have all the answers nor do I find much joy in trying to reinvent the wheel! I am learning too and I often look to my networked resources for answers that I need. Something caught my eye in one of my feeds this morning that relates to what we're talking about: networked, peer-to-peer learning and something called "personal learning networks" - what a great way to say it! Here's the post by Robin Good:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/personal-learning-networks-why-peers-are-better-than-classmates/
Incidentally, there is an effort to foster an online community extending the ITS training workshops I often find myself referring people to. I am sure you know about it but thought I'd mention it:
http://technologytraining.psu.edu/