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March 18, 2005

CIL Thursday: Wikis @ Your Library?

Will Richardson is the Supervisor of Instructional Technology and Communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ who authors the Weblogg-ed blog, and is all about technology in the classroom. In his work bringing technologies like RSS, blogs, and podcasting into the K-12 classroom, he's had experience and knowledge of the fun of wikis. Keep an eye on his blog, he writes awesome stuff on education and technology.

So what's a wiki? "Crazy, chaotic, collaborative content. Anywhere. Anytime. (Gulp.)" So how can you use something like this effectively in education? It's crazy, it's disruptive, it's all sorts of out of control.

The web used to be safer. From 1994-2001, the web was mostly "read-only,", in that people went in search of content, and it was a mostly static interaction. However, now we have a "read/write web," where content is consumed, then responded to (think, say, blogs), for a more interactive experience. It's the people's web, created by the people. This goes back to Cliff Lynch's comments on there being a constituency for everything on the web.

The kids in his classes are:

These technologies have huge implications for schools in terms of education, but also for libraries, because it's all information, which is a librarian's business, no matter the format. Someday, who knows, this may be all we deal with.

Even bigger, it's all collaborative, and even groovier, it's *socially* collaborative in a read/write fashion.

Handy wiki features to know about:

As you can see, some of the chaos can be mitigated through features. :D

The wiki that most people are familiar with is Wikipedia experiencing a lot of scrutiny, especially since establishing provenance for much of that content is quite difficult. However, studies are showing that the information is pretty spot on. As far as research goes, Wikipedia is a good starting point (as most encyclopedias are). But even if the content isn't always spot on, it's an education watching how the content becomes and evolves. The most fascinating entry for him was the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Wikipedia is pretty good at collective, collaborative truth.

So why try it? Wiki's are relatively easy to set up (depending on what you use, and how technically complicated it is), the learning curve is an easy slope, and you can mold it to meet your needs.

Will's opinion is that a wiki is best as a repository and sharing base. Some of his keys to success are basically based in planning, planning, and more planning. Make sure you think out the purpose, the information architecture, styles and naming convention. Even more important is participation, because the more active your community (a class, a workgroup, a staff, etc.), the more robust and useful your wiki.

March 18, 2005 2:26 PM