Thing 10: Wikis

I'm skipping around a little today. Some things have to happen (both inside and outside my control) before I can complete Things 8 and 9.

I decided to spend the afternoon on this snowday learning about wikis. I am getting to be a real fan of the Common Craft videos. The explanation is clear and understandable. I can see that they would be useful for planning upcoming events especially if working with people from different locations. I wonder if my fellow media specialists have considered one for the planning for the annual convention that will be happening in Rochester?

I liked the idea for using a wiki for book reviews. That one will take more thinking about. How and where do I publicize it? Do I really have patrons who would contribute? I like this explanation at PBwiki about the differences between blogs, forums and wikis:

"Blogs are great for one-to-many communication, such as one person writing about personal finance.Forums are good for letting many users ask questions and letting many people answer.Wikis are excellent for collaboration. If you want to let students collaborate, add files, suggest links, and create a document that's comprehensive and up-to-date, use a wiki."

While we do not ban or block Wikipedia with our students, we do discourage its use. One of the things we try to convince our students about is finding the "authority" who created the online information. Often students who do research often know nothing about the topic and therefore have no tools to filter out "bad" information. Nor are students likely to visit multiple sources to check reliability of information if the first source has all the information they need for a project.

I edited the 23 Things on a Stick video by adding a comment for future projects.