Time to Change My Wiki Ways

Wikis are something that I never knew could be a customizable resource before this last year. I have used Wikipedia but I never thought about contributing or creating one of my own. It seems though that everyone else has. Since my background is in secondary education I chose K-12 as the emphasis for this blog.

I want to review a couple of the wikis provided in our class website resources for educational wikis. I looked at the Digital Media in Teaching and Learning wiki and was immediately put off by how busy and disorganized it appeared. It was difficult to navigate and there didn’t seem to be any logic to the entries. It seems that it was made for college students but I had a hard time sorting it out. However, The Discovery -Ism Project was really impressive. This site was designed for middle school students. The students working on this project were using all the different types of technology and embedding document, video and audio to create their own pages that gave them a chance to express themselves. I can see this working really well in a library too. Youth librarians would do well to follow this educator’s example. Another is one created by an educator in New Zealand, named Educational Software and Web 2.0. Her audience is other educators. She has developed a great wiki with live chat options (of course, since she’s on the other side of the world, we’d have to chat in what would be the middle of the night for me). Her wiki is very well organized and full of resources which educators can use in their classes.

I also searched on the Internet to see what others are doing. One wiki I found titled High School Online Collaborative Writing features pages from various schools that have pages for classes in Physics, civil rights, journalism, design technology, and humanities, among others. Obviously, educators are finding many applications for wikis in the classroom. With the increased interest in images and video, wikis could be used for class discussions of artists’ work or to display student work. Video presentations could be made of class presentations or lecture materials with accompanying student research or comments. The wiki does not have to be limited to one class or one school year. It can involve several classes over several years, each class contributing to the whole. One school could also develop a wiki with another school in another state or country to share ideas and cultures.

Using a wiki in a library setting offers many other opportunities for collaboration. Library staff can use a wiki as a tool to develop ideas for community outreach and event planning. By allowing everyone to view and contribute to a wiki it would save time since everyone wouldn’t have to wait for emails to get around to everyone. It would also allow everyone to see all the ideas in one place. A wiki page could also be used to update employees on software update information, library policy changes and such items that would help them serve the users better. The University of Minnesota has a library staff website/wiki, which is a great example of how something like this could work. Not as nicely developed yet, but still a good example is Oregon libraries’ network staff L-net wiki.

For users a wiki could be used for book reviews and recommendations. Iowa Librarians' Readers' Advisory is a wiki site that seems to still be in development but does give me ideas about how to use wikis in a library setting. Allowing users to develop book recommendation pages would give them a voice in the library and other users can add more information about the same books or add others that they want to recommend. Book clubs can use wikis to discuss what they’ve read. Teen groups can create a wiki of current events or favorite YouTube videos. Adult users can use wikis to present and discuss community events and information like elections. One great thing about wikis is that the user does not have to physically be in the library in order to participate. They can be at home, work, vacation, anywhere, and still participate in book clubs and discussions.

The Wikipedia Community Portal was a real eye opener for me. I never realized there was so much going on behind the scenes. Here are a few things that were new to me.

 Portals—This is a place to collectively connect to items. Portals provide information on related items that might otherwise not be directly connected in a regular search in Wikipedia.
 Wikiprojects —This section is dedicated to pages that help coordinate and organize article writing and editing. These are works in progress that are not yet ready to be viewed in the regular Wikipedia pages.
 Collaborations — This is where existing articles are edited to expand content or clean up and improve an article’s content.
 Discussions — This area lists comments and concern brought up by other users and editors. These have been subdivided into categories that make it easy to quickly identify section where a user could find a section they want to contribute to.
 Wikizine —Described as “a (nearly) weekly news letter. It attempts to bring the most important news from the global Wikimedia family for everybody involved with Wikimedia.” It serves a brief ‘head-up’ to keep users informed on changes and topics.
 The Village Pump — “This set of pages is used to discuss the technical issues, policies, and operations of Wikipedia.” This really gives users ownership and voice in the operation and maintenance of Wikipedia.
 Wikipedia Weekly — Wikipedia’s podcast. Well, they have everything else, so why not?

It is amazing to me to realize that I have been using Wikipedia for so long and never knew there was so much to it. I always wondered who contributed to Wikipedia, but never felt until now that it could be me. As a librarian, it is important to the users that I serve that I am aware of and promote these kinds of services, both the official Wikipedia site and my library’s own wiki.

More Digital Storytelling

Architecture and Urbanism of the Southwest http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/adobe/index.html

This section of the “Through Our Parents’ Eyes” website is based on an essay by John Messina a research architect. This is an excellent essay with corresponding images, but for those who are not familiar with architecture or some of the amazing features of the southwest, this could be an opportunity for the author to reformat his essay. He has some multimedia features such as a a QuickTimeVR panorama view of Casas Grandes at Paquimé, Chihuahua, which is really amazing, and a slide show of the adobe brick-making process, but I think that it would be great to hear a narration and explanation of the images by the author. Since this area is so rich with multicultural influences, it could be a great educational tool to better understand which images were developed by each culture and the significance it had. In one section the author writes of how “Because of relatively small windows most of the older adobe buildings appeared dark inside. However, some architects of early adobe buildings employed design strategies in order to selectively position daylight at specific locations in the interior space. The clear story window of many east and south facing New Mexico churches allowed for illumination on the sanctuary or altar area.” There is an image of a church’s altar, which is an example of this, but it would be interesting if possible to get video footage tracking the sun as it rises on that altar, or more examples of buildings with clearstory windows that could be put together with an explanatory narration. This is valuable information that might be overlooked if one feels that they won’t understand what there is to read, but with audio and image/video descriptions, the user could better comprehend the amazing history being documented.