Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Week 7/Thing 16: Wikis

I am falling in love with wikis! I've been a reader of various wikis for a while, in the past month I've started adding & editing content as well (thanks to a freelance writing project). It's been a great experience... it is so much easier to edit within a wiki rather than e-mailing Word documents back and forth. I love how changes are tracked and you don't have to worry about several versions of the same file floating out there as well.

I love the potential to use wikis in schools and libraries. I think they are a wonderful format for collaborative writing projects, where students are given a broad topic (like the Internet Safety idea I posted about earlier) and then each student adds a page or "chapter" about a different aspect of the overall topic (such as cyber bullying, predator awareness, etc.).

I also like the idea to use wikis for book reviews. The wiki administrator could set up folders for various genres and the kids could add pages with reviews within the appropriate folders.

Some of the wikis I looked at weren't very collaborative - they read more like blogs to me. I think an administrator is essential to help keep things organized, but they also need to strongly encourage participation by others.

Vandalism is still a concern, especially when working with middle school students! I have never administered a wiki and wonder if the log in requirements would eliminate this problem?

My favorite wiki from the list was the Library Instruction Resources - it had a good organization scheme (categories) and a fair amount of useful ideas were posted. What a great way to share ideas and - as the front page of that wiki said - avoid reinventing the wheel! It would be nice if one of these library wikis would rise to the top and become a super source of ideas and resources!!

2 comments:

Ann said...

The thing about all of these collaborative tools is that they are only as good as the teams willingness to share and collaborate - and that takes not only relevance, but time.

Ann

robert said...

I also was surprised to note that many of the school wikis only had comments from the librarian or teacher.I guess public relations and advertising are a big part of a successful wiki.
robert