Last week, an undergrad student here at the U of C stumbled across both weblogs.ucalgary.ca and wiki.ucalgary.ca. This student was familiar with blogging and wiki (having a LiveJournal already), and dove right in. And quickly proceeded to blow me away with what a student can/will do given a bit of trust and some supporting resources.
In the 6 days since discovering the wiki, this student has made 206 edits to pages. Created new pages. Created page templates. Categories. Shell pages for faculties, departments, and clubs. Templates for user pages. Fleshed out a very interesting user page for himself (including a couple of ideas that I will blatantly borrow for myself). In the "old" way of publishing stuff to the internet, this would have never happened, because there is no way in hell an Institution would let an undergrad edit a faculty web page. Oh, how things change when you open up a little.
On top of that, the Faculty of Education's Doucette Library has been hammering away, adding resources to their set of wiki pages on resources for education students. And, it looks like our faculty and staff manual for PeopleSoft is being constructed in the wiki. The user manual. In the wiki. That's so awesome!
Sometime Real Soon Now™ I will have to force myself to make some time to write up some articles on the wiki and weblog services, to start getting the word out to a larger audience on campus. So far, I've been limited to preaching to the converted, and having a little bit of osmosis absorb people at the fringes. But, this stuff will be much more valuable for everyone if it's adopted a bit more widely.