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I was reading a great blog post this morning by Lisa Nelson and Karim Kai Logue about how the non-math geeks out here (of which I am one) really need to have two questions answered before we can really learn a math concept:

What does this mean?
When will I ever use it?

After their first example (using percentage to figure out which store had the best sale), I thought that it would be awesome if a website – organized by math topic – could provide math teachers with a library of these real-life examples. Heck – kids could use it too, right? Now – had I not been so ADD I would have discovered further down in the post that one of the authors (Logue) already made such a website called Mathalicious – and a great one at that!

But – alas – my ADD won out and I began thinking of where I could create a site like this where users could work together as a community to build out a library such as this. Aha – wikispaces!!

I hadn’t logged into wikispaces in at least a month or so – the last time being to learn more about Educon 2.2 which, alas, I had to miss. When I got there my ADD took over once again when I noticed the list of my 14 “favorite” wikis appeared on the landing page. I realized that although I belonged to these, I had not been interacting on them – a key part of the success of any wiki. Worse yet, I had created two of them and had not been there after creating them!
So – feeling guilty – and ready to beg forgiveness from my fellow community members – I began clicking into the wikis to begin contributing. To my dismay, I quickly found that I was not the only one who had abandoned the wikis. Out of 14 wikispaces only 2 had any activity in the last year! (That’s 14% for you math geeks.) Wikispaces was a ghost town!

Every wiki represented a great idea that never came to fruition – all for the lack of effort and interest. I started to feel a bit saddened by this, thinking, “Imagine what this world would be like if every great idea was able to be born!” But in the end, I know why these sites were abandoned. They were abandoned for the same reason my wikis were left high and dry: there’s just too much to do and too little time.
Our Web 2.0 networked and interlinked world has opened up vast universes of ideas and opportunities that never existed before. You now have access to the entire world. But guess what? The world is a VERY big place and the online version of it is growing by leaps and bounds. A show on CNBC the other night – Inside The Mind of Google – reported that more than 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There’s a lot of competition for our time and attention.
So – any ideas out there on how you choose to spend your time when there are so many choices available? How about ideas on how to actually get folks to take part in your wikis or online communities so they don’t end up like so many other online ghost towns? Click “Reply” below and weigh in on the discussion!