Feb 19
I am very aware of wikis and think they are a great tool. I first came across wikis a few years back on a gaming website that I inhabit regularly. It was sooooo easy to use and I didn’t realise at first what it was. When I did realise, I was even more impressed.
Now having covered wikis in Learning 2.0 and having heard much about wikis at conferences, on blogs and in the professional literature, I am keen to get going. At my library, a few of us who are involved in getting ideas together for our website redesign, have started a private wiki as a place to share those ideas. Fortunately for me, PLCMC used the same wiki as we chose, PBWiki. It was very useful to watch the short tutorials that PBWiki have on some of the basic functions. (reminder to self, go add some new pages and a sidebar!)
Two of the libraries I am visiting on my study tour, were recommended for their wikis - St Joseph and their wiki based subject guides and Princeton for their book lovers wiki - which are the main points of interest for me at those two libraries. (not long to go now)
So what do I want to use a wiki for at my work - my first wish list item is to get our Information Services manual onto a wiki. That way staff can access it from any computer in any branch, it will be searchable, easy to update and add to and will save a lot of trees! Big advantage will be that it won’t be left to me and another who know html, to edit it! Will be a interesting to see how staff cope with it, in both the new format and in editing. After the manual, I am open to suggestions, but I do know that wikis will have a definite place in my library service.
Feb 19
This week its web-based apps and although the program directed us to use Zoho writer, I took the option of going with Google Docs instead. The reason? I have been having enough trouble keeping up with all the various logins and passwords, but with Google Docs I use the same login and password for Blogger and Gmail. One less login and I still get the same experience.
So what can it do? All the usual word processing stuff as you can see!
I like the idea of having versions, so that if you need to revert to an earlier version (and I know I wish I had been able to in the past) - You Can!
Now its 5 days later and I have just come back to editing the text. Really cool! I could get to like this!
Now before I upload this to my blog from Google Docs (another cool feature), the other part of this exercise was to examine an award winning Web 2.0 tool. I chose craigslist - which I knew of but didn’t know enough about.
craigslist describes itself as “Local classifieds and forums for 450 cities worldwide - community moderated, and largely free.” It started as a small, free not-for-profit site, but is now 25% owned by Amazon and although definitely for profit, much of the site is still free. Although very heavily US and Europe centric, it does have an Australian arm, with centres for Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. On craigslist you can buy and sell goods, find a job and contribute to or read forums (over 70 of them). The traffic across all city points of craiglist is phenomenal, but coming from Melbourne, it is still pretty small at present with only 827 postings at the time of this entry. Still, now that it has a presence in our fair city and once people realise it, I am sure that it will expand here as it has overseas, at a phenomenal rate.
Back to Web apps and amazingly my Google Docs post on this topic published to my blog seamlessly. Very impressive - I’ll have to keep this in mind when blogging at conferences etc.
