Thursday, July 10, 2008

Things 9 and 10: Online Collaboration Tools, and Wikis

A couple of updates, first:

My daughter is visiting relatives in Wyoming, so the other night we tried Skype for the first time (I think I can count this as a 2.0 tool.) Skype lets you communicate online, using a microphone and/or a webcamera. My sister-in-law uses Skype to teach non-English speakers online, and this was our chance to hook up with her for a live demo. It was very interesting (although my personal computer support spouse didn't get to tell me why Voice Over IP and TCP/IP don't always play well together.) The same computer spouse would like to point out that it took days, rather than hours, to fix his personal email last summer. That may be, but his is working now, and mine still isn't....

We're having network problems today at work, so while I'll come back to Thing 9 later and move on to Thing 10, Wikis. We have used a wiki in our libraries for a couple of years now; we use it for technology tips, conference and training reports, and some project brainstorming. I like the fact that the wiki software is smart enough to know when you're linking to a web page, and it deletes any extraneous part of the address (the extra "http://" that you sometimes get when you copy and paste), while the content management system we use for our website can't do that. Hmmm.

I like the idea of wikis as collaborative workspaces, whether is trip or conference planning (which I've seen for library- and non-library situations), project planning, or idea collecting. It's probably one 2.0 tool that I've used a lot. I could see it as a way to plan a poster session or conference report, to share departmental information, for teaching - lots of things. We've looked at Chad Boeninger's Biz Wiki at Ohio University Libraries (business research guides in wiki format - very cool.)

About Wikipedia - I'm not very sympathetic with a general ban on Wikipedia or similar resources. I don't think it's necessarily less reliable than any other source; there are times that it's an appropriate resource, and times that it isn't. I use it myself for quick lookups, or background information on certain things.

I went into the 23 Things Wiki and editing a few things (added a comment on the front page, editing some literary classics, and added a B movie.) Very straightforward.

The network is still being slow, so I'll have to come back later for Thing 9.

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