Thursday, February 26, 2009

Week 7- Things 16 & 17

Well it's been a couple months since I've blogged. The library has been bustling with students and busy nearly every day- which is the way it should be at this time of year. At last I've found time to investigate wikis. I began by going to the most famous wiki of all- Wikipedia. Did you know wiki is Hawaiian for fast? Wikiwikiweb was the first wiki - developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham to make exchanging ideas between programmers easier. Wikis are forums where people can interact and share, contribute and modify content. These applications have really taken off. I looked at many different wikis for this assignment. PBwiki is a very popular wiki hosting site. 40,000 businesses, 250,000 educational and many personal wikis are developed by folks and hosted by this site. The wikis are as varied and unique as the people who designed them. I was impressed by the many fine library wikis I looked at. Some I've bookmarked for future reference. There was the Library Success: Best Practices wiki (information about library innovations, ideas, and collaboration) the Book Lovers wiki (this may become a favorite), and the Library Bloggers Wiki (with dozens and dozens of library wikis available for perusal) among others. The Discovery Resources on wikis posted on the RavenAboutWeb2.0 site were also helpful. After spending time looking at various library wikis I actually posted to the Learning 2.0 Sandbox wiki. Wikis are tools that have many uses. I'm tempted to begin one focusing on new YA literature and attach it to my library website. Several librarians in ASD have done just that- and I'm very impressed with the results.