Thing 10 - wikis

I have used wikis for collaborating as well (see last post). I found that it was a great communication tool for discussions rather than trying to have a group all meet together. With regard to privacy, I did find some differences between the two that I tried - PB Wiki and Wikispaces (free versions). Both were fairly straight forward to use. However, it seems that PB Wiki offered a bit more security in that users could better designate searchability, etc.

I also used wikis for communicating information to staff. It was quite easy to create a wiki page with links to Web 2.0 tools that they could use. I then added my wiki page to my media center blog and used it for a training. It worked very smoothly to be able to make information readily available so quickly!

When discussing the use of wikis and blogs with staff in their classrooms, I like to let teachers know that they typically have better monitoring capabilities with a blog since they can have all posts go through them for approval, versus a wiki where the teacher usually monitors the input after the fact. However, all activity on the wiki is tracked, which does help teachers out in this regard.

As for Wikipedia, I was at first skeptical about its content. As librarians, we are always emphasizing credible sources. So how could a website where pretty much anyone can contribute be credible? But as I started looking at the entries on Wikipedia, I found them to be pretty well documented. Not to mention the fact that Wikipedia tends to come up first on searches. So I have changed my opinion somewhat. I find Wikipedia to be a good first overview on a topic. But I still like to find a few more resources to back up any Wikipedia information.