Another bold experiment

Well, maybe not bold, but definitely new and different for us. For the past month or so, we've been experimenting with using wikis for some of our class project pages. The idea is that as students and faculty find helpful resources, they can add links to the pages themselves. So far, just the Cutting Edge page has seen many contributions of this sort. I've only had one instance of tomfoolery (committed by a senior on the Chicano Research project page -- who said, when caught red-handed, that he "just wanted to see if it worked"). Later this week, I get to try something new with Mr. Vaughn's section of World History. They'll be using wikis to collaborate on comparisons of how the human figure is portrayed in the art of different cultures. We'll keep their work private since they'll be downloading images from databases.

Jennifer Erbach, this semester's GSLIS practicum student, also converted our Recommended Reads page to a wiki platform. So far it's been a soft launch. Natalie put up a bulletin board in the hall, but it promotes the website as a whole. I've spoken about the wiki at the book club and now I'm writing about it here. If I really want to see some action, though, I'll need to send out a general e-mail announcement. Either that, or we'll never get much past three titles on the Absolutely Best Books Ever page. What's stopping me? Mostly that editing is not quite as transparent as I'd like it to be. We keep adding to the instructions, but that can be a losing game. Still, it's time to get the word out. It's just too much fun to keep to ourselves!