Monday, November 22, 2010
Muddiest Point
I thought the weakest of all the readings was the article, "Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons" by Charles Allan. I am not saying it was useless. I found it very informative and, considering the topic that the class needed to focus for the week, I knew for sure it fit right in there. The problem was that we were also required to watch a video from TED, titled “How a ragtag band created Wikipedia” by Jimmy Wales. Because the video explained how useful of a purposed Wikis tend to serve (not to mention Wikipedia is often the first thing that pops into people’s minds whenever the technology is being mentioned), I felt as though there was probably no need to bring up the article by Allan. But then again, I tend to absorb more information whenever I am listening to the content rather than reading it, so that could explain why I felt as though I was able to grasp more information about Wikis from the Wales video rather than the Allan article.
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I felt like the wiki and weblog articles were given to specificy how their uses can apply directly to the operation of libraries, which is something I think kind of gets lost in the discussion of how generally awesome they are. I am currently working in the Teens Dept at the Carnegie Library, and we have both a wiki and a heaping mess of a Policies & Procedures manual similar to what was referenced in the reading, so that example gave me a good baseline of the small-scale practical applications of wiki technology, whereas Wikipedia is about as large-scale and ambitious as it gets.
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