As more universities adopt web 2.0 technology, administrators want to know exactly how students are using these tool and what benefits they bring. Campus Technology addressed this question in their latest article “Wikis, Blogs, & More, Oh My!’

Here are two different ways Universities are using wikis, and their results:

Professor Kane at Boston University encourages students to submit their own exam questions via his Exam Question Workspace wiki. In a year, students submitted a whopping 600 questions overall.

At SUNY-Delhi, CIO Patrick Masson uses wikis to assist in policy decision-making. Masson says user response to this approach has been overwhelming. Over the course of one month, the school’s president made 73 edits, the coordinator of online learning made 58, the chair of budget and planning made 31, and the vice president of student housing made 29.

Here are three more suggestions from PBwiki educators: (more…)

InformationWeek just came out with a great article on the impact of Web 2.0 collaboration tools like PBwiki on the role of IT.  Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service represent a major paradigm shift for IT managers, but as InformationWeek puts it:

“You can ignore Web 2.0 tools, or try to shoo users away. If you take one of these approaches, let us know how it works out for you. A better approach is to embrace new collaboration methods, whether through an in-house deployment, a software-as-a-service option, or both.”

Longtime customer and FOP (friend-of-PBwiki) Doug Cornelius also had some nice quotes about PBwiki versus SharePoint:

“It’s a classic story of enterprise 2.0,” says Goodwin Procter’s Cornelius. “We’re up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year.” Fact is, users will find ways to make their working lives more convenient–with or without the input of IT. This is particularly true when it comes to Web collaboration tools.

Music to our ears. 

As y’all might have noticed from our Web site, PBwiki is now conducting regular webinars to help folks learn how they can use PBwiki to make their lives better: http://pbwiki.com/content/webinars

The reaction to these webinars has been so positive, that now we’d like to expand them to include PBwiki users.

If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming PBwiki webinar, please leave a comment on this post.

If you’re an expert using PBwiki in your work, or if PBwiki has made a big difference in your life, we might want you to star in our next webinar. For example, one upcoming webinar will feature a leading professional organizer, who will talk about how you can use PBwiki to organize your life.

This is especially perfect for professionals who would like a way to reach PBwiki’s loyal user base of millions.

So if you think you have what it takes to co-host a PBwiki webinar, leave a comment, or email me, Chris Yeh, at chris dot yeh at pbwiki dot com.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing your name in lights.

P.S. As I mentioned in my last webinar on templates, if you have a template that you’ve created that you think really kicks ass, let me know. We might just add it PBwiki (named after you, of course!).

P.P.S. If you’d like to be featured in a webinar and reach millions of PBwiki users — and PBwiki has made a big difference in your life — please leave a comment on this post.

Tim Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, a book that’s become phenomenally successful. (The book is about “lifestyle design” and working less to achieve your goals, including some provocative ideas about outsourcing your life.)

After simultaneously being listed as a bestseller on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Businessweek lists, Advertising Age listed it as one of 2007’s best product launches.

In fact, we have a few copies of the book in our office.

For the second edition of his book, Tim decided to use PBwiki to edit his New York Times bestseller. On the 4-Hour Workweek wiki, he asked his readers to point out corrections, add ideas, and suggest examples for the newly revised 4-Hour Workweek.

The 4-Hour Work Week wiki launched last night around 11pm and already has hundreds of visitors and dozens of high-quality edits.

This is a great way to use PBwiki. By allowing his readers to add their thoughts, Tim taps into their collective knowledge. And because he has a Premium wiki, he can assign his editors “Contributor” access so anything they do is reversible (e.g., no deleting pages!).

Learn more:

• The 4-Hour Workweek wiki

• Official press release
• Tim’s blog post

If you’re interested in using PBwiki for managing a project — or writing your own New York Times bestseller! — create a free wiki at PBwiki.com.

Fortune Small Business just wrote a nice article about how Lee Rosen of Rosen Law used his creativity to drive adoption of his PBwiki.

Rosen offered a $1,000 cash prize to his 32 employees–for every page they created on the wiki, they earned a possible combination to the company safe (which contained the aforementioned $1,000).  At the end of three months, the prize went to Ben Sutton (pictured below).

But Lee had the last laugh–by switching his people over to PBwiki, he saved $25,000 per year that he had been spending on running a Lotus Notes server.  And money wasn’t the only benefit:

“The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says Rosen. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki. With Lotus Notes, it required a programmer.”

Maybe you don’t have $1,000 to spare to drive adoption of your wiki, but maybe you can modify Rosen’s technique to fit your organization.  How about giving your top user tickets to the game, or a night out on the town?

If you get your entire company using PBwiki, the benefits will far outweigh the cost.

Click here to read the Fortune Small Business article.

We want to welcome Paul Singh, our newest member of the PBwiki family. As the Director of Support, he’ll be responsible for getting you the help and training you need from PBwiki.

Paul has an extraordinary background in Saas (software as a service) support. In the past, he’s built up a support organization for a $48 million dollar SaaS product.

What this means for you
Look for rapid improvements in PBwiki support coming up, including better training materials and answers to common questions.

Welcome, Paul!

We’re surprised and thrilled to see how fast our PBwiki community is growing. Today, we’re announcing some news:

If your co-workers or friends have been wondering about using wikis, point them to this post for a roundup of articles on using PBwiki to make your life easier.
1. Video: See how we use PBwiki to power our own team
2. Create pages and upload files
3. Best practices for getting others to join your wiki
4. Add interactive plugins to your wiki
5. See other PBwiki examples

We were combing through some data a few weeks ago and discovered something interesting: Over 1/3 of the Fortune 500 has used PBwiki. This is great news for our Small Business Edition — with so many Fortune 500 users, we’ve already seen small business users feeling more comfortable about security and safety.

So we’re turning to our PBwiki community: How should we spread the word about PBwiki in the Fortune 500 to small businesses?

Leave a comment on this post with a suggestion or example of how you would spread the word to business users. The best suggestion will win one free year of the PBwiki Small Business Edition!

Folks,

This morning at 8:03am PDT, our San Francisco center had a power issue, causing about half of our servers there to go down. Due to the large amount of data we now safeguard, as our servers came back up, some of them took a while to verify the correctness of PBwiki’s data, and one of our database servers was fried. Thankfully, we’re quite rigorous about making sure data is in multiple places, so your data was not at risk.

But PBwiki was slow/unavailable for about an hour. We sincerely apologize; we’re putting in place mechanisms to keep the service from being as affected by a single outage and able to recover more quickly and gracefully. We take great pride in making sure that you have smooth, snappy, secure access to your data at all times.

Sincerely,
David Weekly, CEO

We’re thrilled to welcome Mike Bulajewski to the PBwiki family as a UI engineer:

Mike couldn’t decide if he wanted to create intuitive and beautiful designs, or write web applications that work, so he he came to PBwiki to do both. Mike brings skills in visual design, a love for intuitive interfaces, and the technical skills to bring them to life. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer, a performance engineer for Amdocs and a UI designer for Dun & Bradstreet, and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cal State Sacramento.

What this really means is that Mike can badmouth engineers with the marketing team, and then turn right around and mock marketing with the engineers. Clever, Mike.

Please welcome him to our team. And stay tuned for some dazzling UI changes.

(To see other job openings at PBwiki, visit our Jobs page.)