Week 7, Thing 16 and 17

I still feel like I'm getting the hang of Wikis. I guess I like the control and the orderliness of a blog. Blackboard, the online package used by the university just added a wiki tool and I used it with some people I am working with to write a conference proposal and to keep our research notes. I really like the ease of editing and the ability to look at the history of a document - not only what changes were made but who made them. We found that we needed to establish some protocols for working on the wiki when it came close to deadline and folks were adding/editing on top of each other. Some things were getting lost in the shuffle and took work to reinstate.

I enjoyed looking around at several of the wikis for this week's assignment. One thing I noticed was that the wikis that had an architecture that included nested tables of contents were the easiest to navigate around. Does one person have to set that up, or does it also eventually evolve from the work of participants? I've done some reading about wikipedia and it is interesting that some people like to add content, while others enjoy copy editing or making the page look good. So I guess a wiki community might have people taking different roles to maintain the site. I really like the pathfinder type wikis again these utilized some sort of hierarchical architecture that was easy to navigate and intuitive to use.

I've tentatively agreed to participate in a kindergarten math wiki. Participants from all over will post to the wiki monthly and will be able to look at the data from many classrooms. For example the first month we will just count how many cars go by our school in five minutes and post that to the wiki.

I've been thinking that a wiki might be another way to set up our Best Books discussion: Best Books 2006 since it starts to get a bit unwieldy near the end although tags help us to navigate and librarything has been a great additional tool.

I went to the California Web 2.0 Sandbox and easily logged in and added to the blogging page. It is really cool to be in North Carolina adding content to a California site. Thanks California!