Wikis to be sure

Hi Did you know that Wiki means fast or quick in Hawaiian?


My thanks to Rod Maynard in Flickr for this photo of Hawaii - unfortunately, this is somewhere that I have not visited.

Another post to comment on the Wiki exercise. I am quite excited about Wikis as they seem to have lots of potential from providing a web presence for the institutions as used by a number of public libraries to being a useful forum for group work. The excercise that we had to do asked the group to comment on the library orientation brochure and make suggestions for its future design. this type of exercise seems to be one being picked up by educators using the Wiki for group work and administration tasks such as working on policy manual changes.

When I was discussing this exercise with a colleague, they asked the question about how this was different from email? A very good question, I thought, however, easily explained in that the comments made by individuals are in one spot for all the group to see. There is also less chance of things going astray. A Wiki generally has a coordinator whose job it is to take the comments forward, synthesising them into a reporting mechanism.

Jimmy Wales at the Education.au seminar in Perth recently, commented that Wikis are generally successful when dedicated to a single suject. His example was the Muppet Wiki. Anyone visiting this Wiki knows that if a subject like Perth is prompted then the information sought and provided will relate to the Muppets and Perth.

I would like to investigate a Wiki as an information sharing tool for a subject area or maybe a whole of library news forum. My thought on this is required though.

Enough of my rambles for now as I am so longing to do the RSS feeds exercise which everyone has advised is the most difficult of all. I have done the reading, but not the exercises - too many things happening at the moment. You find that once embarking on the path of social networking the information overload that one may have previously been experiencing just becomes a whole lot larger - I did say enough of my rambles.

ELLE