My name is Kevin and I teach biology classes. I have used Wetpaint with my anatomy, physiology, and microbiology classes. Most of my classes are taught via distance education, with a live video connection between me and my class. My interest in wikis and education started when I was unhappy with the physiology textbook I was using. Partway into the term I decided that as a class we would make our own physiology wiki textbook at wikibooks.org (same group as wikipedia). This project was chaotic the first term as I had the class in 18 groups each working on different chapters at the same time (how do I choose what to lecture on each week?). The second term worked better, since the basic structure of the book was in place and we went through chapter by chapter as a class, improving it as we went. The book became a featured book on wikibooks and is respectable but could still use some improvement. The third term I had a very small class (only 7 students), and it did not work very well. There were too few people to divide into groups, and the students were so busy learning the material that they had little time for making new contributions or significant improvements.

Itried going back to a regular textbook, but I still wanted to continue to use wikis. I found Wetpaint, and thePhysiwiki page was my first experience--the class worked in groups to write lecture notes and review questions after each lecture. I was happy with how this worked--I loved the ease of working in WetPaint, enjoyed the dynamics of fresh work being posted daily for the benefit of all, and was happy to see students working together. The following semester I taught microbiology, so naturally we created a Microbiowiki site. In summer 2008 I taught anatomy to two classes and we created the Anatowiki site (my favorite so far). So far I have not used any of these Wetpaint wikis a second time--I am anxious to see how that goes.

An amazing and unexpected benefit to working on wikis is that I entered a contest on the Australia Travel Wiki and won a free trip to Sydney! We had a great one-week adventure in November 2007!