Thing 10 - Wikis

I am excited about the concept of a wiki. I am thinking how useful it would be to set one up for our Staff Development Committee at school to work on revising our plan. (Something we need to do and can never find enough time to get together on.) A wiki seems the perfect answer.

The appeal is in the amount of collective information we can amass. Booklists grow and huge amounts of advice on the various components of librarianship are all at my fingertips! It’s easy to get lost in all the things I want to read about. I can see a wiki getting so large and unwieldy that it could lose its usefulness.

From the ones I looked at, my head is buzzing with ideas. My son is a beekeeper and a digital native – I need to tell him about the beekeeping wiki. I want to let the Geography teacher at school know about the MN150 wiki. I know he is doing some staff development for the sesquicentennial. It would be neat if his students contributed to the people, places and events that have shaped our state’s history. I may also send a link for the Educational heritage wiki to the ESL teachers.

There seems to be a great variety in wikis. The Educational Heritage one looks like it’s very limited as far as contributions. The beekeeping one looked like there was hardly anything there and it needed some interested people to start pages. Many look similar to Wikipedia in format. It brings home the fact that the information is editable. I was a participant in the KVSC trivia weekend last month. One of the teams was disqualified for changing the answers in Wikipedia so teams accessing it later got the wrong answer. Now I see how going into the edit history could help.

I found it quite easy to log in and edit the 23Things on a Stick wiki. I was a little confused after I added my entry and went back to the page to see that there was a LOT more on it than I saw originally. It must have loaded very slowly.

I’m thinking it may not be that hard to set up a wiki for the Staff Development Committee.