My initial impression of wikis, based on Wikipedia, is that they were a free-for-all and therefore totally unreliable as sources of credible information. However I notice that Wikipedia requires a no. of sources to be listed for each article or it will be pulled because not considered reliable. In checking the Princeton and St Joseph's County Public Library wikis I also saw that membership is restricted to a certain community of people; in other words, not free-for-alls at all. Now the basic impression I have of a wiki is that it is a space in which a community of people can create some kind of work together (almost like a more sophisticated version of the "track changes" tool available with Word).
In general my impression of all the tools we are learning about in Learning 2.0 is that they are trying to carve out a space on the internet where "ordinary people" can create as they please i.e. without having to do a course in html first! It reminds me of a discussion I had with a colleague in the very early days of the internet, in which he expressed to me that the internet was a sort of "virtual wild west" where anything goes. Over time increasing amounts of law and order have inevitably crept in and this new generation of blogs and wikis appears to be an attempt to carve out a new "wild west" sector in the virtual world. However once again we see that some kind of regulation becomes inevitable; for example, the "Library Success" wiki now requires email verification because of vandalism problems.
Its great though, that these tools are being made available to laymen like myself, so that I am empowered to participate in this online world.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
#13 Del.icio.us
This seems to be essentially keyword creation. I can't help thinking that the complete freedom with which you first start adding tags would eventually have to give way to some kind of thesaurus, at the very least, once you start to get a lot of sites bookmarked, otherwise your search tool would become meaningless. It strikes me as a useful adjunct to the hierarchical ordering of a browser favourites folder, but not as a replacement for it. The "social" part of tagging made me a little uneasy, due to the lack of privacy.
Monday, November 5, 2007
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