Thing #10

Much of the wiki basics was old-hat to me, but it was still enjoyable learning about what others are doing with wikis. I was a bit surprised at some of the examples, however. To me, the strength of a wiki is the collaborative nature it fosters. When I see institutions putting all their policies or even service information in the form of a wiki I don't get it. Creating web pages and policies with a wiki between colleagues makes a lot sense and I hope to utilize that aspect in the future. But using a wiki to maintain that content only seems reasonable if there is no one on-site trained in basic HTML.

Because my university has a variety of in-house tools such as Moodle, NetFiles and U-Think blogs I don't use the free ones like blogspot or pbwiki very much. The technology is the same, though. I do find myself pausing to consider what tool to use for a given project. Our library is co-sponsoring a campus book read, my wife and I are leading a theatre trip to Dublin and there will be a banned books event this fall. All of these activities could benefit from a Web 2.0 tool. But which one? Blog, wiki, discussion/learning forum? I'll have to investigate some more.