(Photo courtesy of PinkCakeBox and Flickr.)

PBwiki’s 3rd birthday is coming up on May 31, and to celebrate that happy day, as well as PBwiki hitting the 500,000 wiki mark, we’re giving away free lifetime upgrades to wikis 499,999, 500,000, and 500,001.  Click here for the full announcement.

We’ll be announcing the three lucky winners on June 4.  They’ll be receiving lifetime upgrades with all the bells and whistles.  Tell your friends!

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:

Create a community for new students - Dr. Whelan suggests using the wiki to develop a comprehensive set of resources to help newly arriving international students learn more about school, the culture of our country and people they can turn to. He reports that, “the wiki is being used by people all around the country and really facilitates long distance collaboration.”

FAQ Site: Jim W. set up a Frequently Asked Questions page regarding his online class on Internet Resources, then asked my graduate students to both ask and answer the questions. He says, “Believe it or not, the FAQ started as a blank page. Students provided all the questions, answers, and organization/classification themselves.”

Support site for presentations — Dan M created a wiki to support numerous staff development workshops he does with educators in the US and Australia. He creates wikis as support sites for presentations and workshops.

How are you using your PBwiki?

Stay tuned for some more quick videos from my flip camera. What do you want to know from the PBwiki team? Leave your questions for our next video in the comments!

If you’re interested in joining this wild and crazy team, see what positions we have open at http://pbwiki.com/content/jobs

Your data is safe.

We’ll continue updating this post with the newest developments. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and we’ll respond right away.

[11:37pm] We’ve revised our timeline and expect to restore full access to wikis by 4am PST. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please see some of the Q&A in the comments (below). If you have any other questions, please leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

[1:42am] Great news: We’ve restored access to your wikis. You should be able to access your wiki now.

If you have any questions or notice any irregularities, please click “Help” in your wiki. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience — we all worked around the clock to restore full access to your wikis.

But how did all these teachers get to this point?

If you find yourself asking this question, we’re here to help! Tune in to tomorrow’s webinar to find out the best way build your own remote classroom and engage your students

We’re going to share community tips on classroom management, building a classroom community, and how to design group work on your wiki. Learn how to use our new PBwiki 2.0 features to create private team pages, change student access controls, and more.

You can sign up for our webinar here.

We’re here to help.  Just this week, I held a webinar on “Driving Adoption of PBwiki“.  For an hour, we talked about how you can use the four keys to driving adoption (structure, resources, workflow, and rewards) to make PBwiki an integral part of how your team works.

If you missed the webinar, no worries, the recording is available here.  And even if you don’t have a full hour to watch the webinar, you can go to the Driving Adoption Wiki, download my full presentation ( AdoptingPBwiki.ppt) and learn at your own pace.

Good luck!

If you’re interested in trying out new things ahead of time, don’t mind the occasional glitch, and are interested in giving us feedback, you can apply here. We can’t wait to hear from you.

To insert a footnote: Click Insert Plugin >> PBwiki Magic >> Footnote. Insert as many footnotes as you need.

This feature works for PBwiki 1.0 and 2.0. Please let us know what you think! Feedback is always welcome.

“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. 

To watch this and other recorded webinars, or to sign up for future webinars, be sure to visit our webinars page.