I have been thinking a lot about Wiki’s lately. It’s a tool that I have been recently using a lot. It seems like anyone can efficiently use Wikis for a multitude of purposes. Personally, I have been using them in my class work for group projects. I find that it is one of the most efficient ways of communicating with large amounts of information and to collaborating with others. Here are some of the Wikis I have been working on:
I do tend to favor Wikispaces over PBwiki. I suppose I just found Wikispaces first and learned how to use it and felt comfortable enough with it to keep using it. The two links above are for class projects; one is currently ongoing for a marketing class (Shady Acres, a fictional library) and video games in libraries was used for a research class that has since been finished.
Even contemplating my few experiences with wikis I feel that they have a great potential in library use for the future. They are free or very inexpensive (usually if you want them to be private) they are easy to learn how to use and they have lots of tools that come in handy. For more information about wikis look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikis . For trying out your own wiki http://www.wikispaces.com/ or http://pbwiki.com/ are good choices.
Comment #4
I find wikis very helpful too. In fact when I am at the reference desk and a student asks a question and I feel I am not sure how to answer it. I do a quick search on wikipedia and get a quick idea about the subject and then do my search on the SWAN OPAC or First Search OCLC catalogs.
I find Wikipedia really handy when I meet a student who needs a shoprt biography on a particular person right now, right away or tomorrow. Then in the middle of the reference interview, I discover all of the potential information available in the library’s circulating collection are currently checked-out.
In some instances you might have the choice to send patrons to visit another library or better yet, use the interlibrary loan services. In many situations students don’t have a ride to go to a neigboring library or they simply don’t give us enough time to try and interlibrary loan the books because it usually takes at least three to four working days for books to arrive.
So when I find myself in a situation like this one, I do a quick wikipedia search with the student and then search for supporting information from books found in the reference biography collection. Sounds like I am doing double work, but there is a reason why I don’t just print out the information from wikipedia and hand it to the student.
The reason I do this is because the teachers in elementary, highschool and junior colleges in the area I work for, will not accept wikis as a research sources because they are concerned with the accreditability of the information. So as future librarians, how to we convince teachers to support online wikis.