After lunch, which I spent agreeably at Phil Bradley's table, Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly, both of UKOLN, gave a two-handed session on wikis, Brian stepping in as a Danish speaker, Sara Jorgensen, was indisposed.
Marieke gave a presentation called Wiki or Won't He? the highs and lows of establishing a public sector wiki. After defining wikis, and some of the software that can be used to build them, she discussed the spread of wikis in the UK public sector. She had been unable to find any examples of UK libraries using wikis externally. Indeed, some, for example DEFRA, had established wikis but had later liquidated them. She advised a "soft policing" approach to the issues of vandalism, spam and wikiquette that cause anxiety and gave a checklist for setting up a wiki (oddly she suggested choosing software as the first point, before identifying the purpose of the wiki). She gave examples of wikis used at the 2006 Institutional Web Management Workshop. She identified the wiki managers role as being part midwife, part champion and part minder and suggested the following uses for wikis in libraries:
• book reviews
• comments and suggestions boxes
• FAQs about library services
• commonly asked enquires
• local history and personal stories
• course collaboration and e-portfolios
• library project work and research
Brian then gave a presentation based on his personal experience of using wikis over two years, chiefly to support the Institutional Web Management Workshops and other UKOLN events. One of the many advantages of using wikis for events is that ideas and feedback can be recorded and preserved, rather than being scribbled up illegibly on flip-charts and then lost or thrown away. He noted that wiki functionality was starting to be bundled with VLEs, for example Moodle, the open source VLE. The first time he used them, in 2004, delegates used IRC, Skype and Wikalong, an extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer. He discussed various types of wiki and asked whether collaborative web-based word-processing and spreadsheet tools such as Writely or Google Spreadsheets could be considered wikis. One of the issues that worried people about wikis is dependence on external services.
Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, library 2.0, wikis
Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, library 2.0, wikis
