Have any suggestions for how to get students motivated to post?
I believe that the WIKI with the BLOG is good combination. The advantage of blog is that there brief commentaries are made. The advantage of the WIKI is that several students can make a document complete. However, wiki is more difficult to write up.
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Ian's reply: I do not accept any work on paper. I get all of my students to just use wiki pages for everything. I used blog pages as well, but I find them to restrictive with chronological entries. If students can use Facebook or Myspace you can be sure they can use a wiki. Another great thing to do I find is to strip the best answers from an assignment or test and to pop them all together on a wiki page for student review. I make it anonymous (i.e. do not identify individual authors) but get a huge response and number of page views. Sharing student’s favourite photos is also a great trick. You can strip them off individual student pages, and paste them onto a class page. This is great as the actual photos remain hosted on the individual pages. Getting them to embed videos is also great.

One last thing. When teaching in China last year, I found that any wiki site that could have password entry (as opposed to password editing) was blocked so we had to use wikispaces instead of wetpaint or pbwiki etc. Once I figured that out, my Chinese students loved using a wiki, but you do need to council students to be more careful about what they say (particularly in China) that you would otherwise. I find University senior management tend to be a bit paranoid too, which is why they love boring proprietary products like Blackboard.

Mr. Bartels' reply:
That is just really the ultimate question in education. One thing that has worked for me in the past is simply being enthusiastic about it. If I am really excited, and my students can see that, they are more likely to, at bare minimum, be a little interested in what I am talking about or doing. You can also have students post assignments to your class wiki. You can be a pioneer with a paperless classroom. “Don’t hand it in on paper, it must be posted.” I hope these couple of ideas have helped. Keep us posted on how it goes. Happy painting!

Kevin's reply:
If I want significant contributions from students I have had to make it part of their grade. Otherwise, only a few students participate and we don't produce anything terribly useful. This term I am having students work in groups, and each student must also evaluate each others' work. Knowing that their peers will be looking at their work and evaluating it seems to be a good motivator for people to do good work. I have students do the evaluations privatelyby taking surveys I have set up at Survey Monkey (which you can use for free).

David's reply:
You have to give them a chance to get a hang of how it all works. Have an induction session in which they can all create accounts at computers in an IT Lab or MMLC and show them the ropes of adding pages, making edits and posting comments. A couple of barnstorming sessions in which they can post during lesson time with you on hand to help them with technical problems can help. After that you need a carrot and stick approach.

The carrot: tempt them to the site with good content - videos, quizzes, polls, study tips and so forth, and invite students to upload their best assignments as a reward. Use a sitemeter to find out who's been viewing the site - students may feel encouraged when they find out that their work is being read all around the world. Get the principal to post comments too if you can - a 'well done' message from the head can work wonders for students' confidence.

The stick: grade their contributions - use a rubric that includes how frequent their edits and comments are, how substantial and how constructive.

Cindy's reply:
Like Ian, I love the non-linear, jump in where it's useful and appropriate (not at the bottom of the Blackboard thread) aspect of the wiki. Once students get the hang of it, they like that as well. Often they haven't had the Blackboard experience, so don't know how great this is, but sooner or later they learn.

Like David and Kevin, I made it part of their grade. They had to sign up by a certain date, they had to make a certain number of contributions by specific dates, and I showed them how I knew when they had done these things. I used wikispaces last year but am looking forward to the features that wetpaint has and using this venue this year.

David - are you willing to share your rubric? I used some guidelines, but it wasn't as specific as it needed to be.