This morning I logged onto the Teachmeet wiki to look at a couple of things. There are a couple of teachmeets coming up that I've got a hand in organising: Teachmeet Brum and Teachmeet Blackcountry. (Do sign up if you're interested!)
I noticed a rather strange link at the top of the wiki, that led, of all places, to a Mercedes Benz website in Indonesia. Not very teachmeet I thought. I suppose there could be a reason for that being on there, but not one that was obvious, so I deleted it (if it is a bona fide link, then whoever put it on can reinstate it easily).
It made me wonder how often that sort of thing happens.
The teachmeet wiki is a shared resource, it's reasonably easy to work out how to log on - you could write whatever you wanted on there. I know that on Wikipedia there are people who deliberately put false stuff on there, just for a laugh, but I think whoever did this is trying to increase their website's ranking in the Google system, which has something to do with how many links you have from other websites. I may be wrong.
I remember Tom Barrett a little while ago talk about how he 'tends his garden' of Interesting Ways: his crowd-sourced resources for different ways to use technology in the classroom. That phrase means a little more to me this morning having done a little weeding myself. When damage occurs to a shared resource, who fixes it? If it's crowd-sourced, can anyone do so? I didn't set up the Teachmeet wiki, so should I be allowed to take stuff off there if I don't think it's been put there in the 'spirit of Teachmeet'?
It's great to be able to share stuff freely, to collaborate on tech that improves teaching. It speeds things up, gives us a wider range of resources to use, and richer ways of using them. I wonder if this kind of 'damage' happens often... and if it will increase in the future. When more and more teachers use tech, will others use it as an opportunity for cheap publicity, or better Google rankings? What experience do toher have of this?
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