Week 7, Thing #16

I took an online "tour" of wikis at educational institutions. There are some interesting and innovative uses of Wikis in educational institutions. The well known language institute at Penn State, CALPER (http://calper.la.psu.edu/technology.php), Center for Advanced Language Proficiency, Education, and Research, features blogs, wikis, and chat rooms on its Computer Mediated Activity Library online. Students can learn about these innovative technologies, or simply use the technologies to enhance their language development. Working papers posted online by Steven L. Thorne, Rebecca W. Black and J. Scott Payne describe the use of wikis and blogs in foreign language instruction. I found wikis at public schools, private schools, universities, and of course wiki software is a part of Blackboard, a popular forum for offering online courses. On Tufts University’s AT web page (http://uit.tufts.edu/at/?pid=24), there are links to a digital library, blogs, podcasts, online forums, and wikis, where students can post ideas and research for others to comment upon. Bryn Mawr uses wikis in its writing courses, where students post rough drafts for comments. The University of Minnesota has taken an interesting approach to web 2.0 with its UThink page, with over 6,000 blogs and 89,000 entries, lists of recent entries, and, if you scroll down the page, “suggested reading” links of local and national newspapers, radio stations, and some of the more well known blogs. The blog page is supported by a “technical wiki,” where people can suggest ways to better tweak the blog page. This seems more like the “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality than an innovative use of technology, but, hey, there are 89,000 entries to choose from, so start blogging and give your good suggestions via the wiki! Librarian Laura Cohn is just signing off this month on her Library 2.0 wiki (http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/). She’s retiring from Albany, and her blog posts will stay up for a year, well worth reading. Laura Cohn sees wikis as a way of preserving the “collective intelligence” of a “cultural institution,” such as a library, by allowing patrons to improve web pages, add suggested bibliographic links and build subject lists, give tips to newcomers on navigating the facility, and collaborate on research and projects. The wikis she recommends following online are The Unofficial EZProxy Support Wiki http://www2.potsdam.edu/ezproxy/wiki/index.php/Main_Page which offers free and useful software code, and Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki (mentioned earlier in this course, online at http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Main_Page). Her last few postings talk about the balance between control and collaboration, with the “fading out of the webmaster, and the focusing in on the group.” Her very practical suggestion is for librarians to practice this kind of collaboration by creating wikis for their librarian committees and groups.