Week 7, Exercises 16 and 17

#16 So what’s in a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content. Wikipedia, the online open-community encyclopedia, is the largest and perhaps the most well known of these knowledge sharing tools. With the benefits that wikis provide the use and popularity of these tools is exploding. Some of the benefits that make wikis so attractive are:

Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.

Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.

Earlier versions of a page can be viewed and reinstated when needed.

And users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content. In most cases simple syntax structure is used. 

As the use of wikis has grown over the last few years, libraries all over the country have begun to use them to collaborate and share knowledge. Among their applications are pathfinder or subject guide wikis, book review wikis, ALA conference wikis and even library best practices wikis.

Discovery Resources:

Use these resources to learn more about wikis:

Wiki’s: A Beginner’s Look – an excellent short slide presentation that offers a short introduction and examples

What is a Wiki? – Library Success wiki presentation

Using Wikis to Create Online Communities – a good overview of what a wiki is and how it can be used in libraries

Discovery Exercise:

1. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at some library wikis and blog about your finding. Here’s a few examples to get you started:

SJCPL Subject Guides – a pathfinder wiki developed by the St. Joseph County Public Library system

Book Lovers Wiki – developed by the Princeton Public Library

Library Success: A best practices wiki

ALA 2006 New Orleans wiki – an example of a wiki created to support a specific event

The Bull Run Library wiki - a public library wiki and also a Learning 2.0 participant

Library wiki examples

2. Create a blog post about your findings. What did you find interesting? What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki?

So what’s in a wiki? Find out by doing some exploring on your own.

#17 Playing around with PBWiki

“Sandbox” is the term that wikis often use to describe the area of the website that should be used for pure play. For this discovery and exploration exercise, we’ve set up a whole Learning 2.0 Favorites wiki* that’s for nothing but play!

For this “explore-and-play-with-wikis” exercise, you are asked to add an entry or two to the PBwiki Learning 2.0 wiki.

The theme of this wiki is simply “Favorites” : Favorite books, favorite vacation spots, favorite restaurants, favorite anything …all you need to do is play and add your thoughts. To mark your adventure on this site, you should add your blog to the Favorite Blogs page.

Discovery Resources:

     PB Wiki Tour – Find out how this collaborative tool can be used

     PBWiki Video Gallery – Short videos of PBwiki features

     PB Wiki Tips

Discovery Exercise:

1. Access the PLCMC Learning 2.0 wiki and create a login account for yourself. Many libraries have added to this wiki. It is fun to see all the libraries participating in Learning 2.0.

2. Add your blog to the Favorite Blogs page. That’s how we’ll know that you’ve been there. It’s easy to do if you follow this simple syntax. Example:

     [ URL | Title of blog][ http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com | Learning 2.0 ]

     With brackets [ ] and just a little typing, you’ve added a link – yup, it’s as easy as that!

OPTIONAL: Add a favorite or two to a few other pages (Favorite books, favorite vacation spot, etc). And, if you feel up to the challenge, you might even want to create a separate page for book review or short travel essay and link up to that.

3. Create a post in your blog about the experience.

* NOTE: The PLCMCLearning Wiki was created using the free version of PBWiki, a tool that lets you create webpages that anyone can edit.