Wiki in the Classroom

We’re using a service called PB Wiki, a company that operates on the premise that creating a Wiki should be as simple as making a Peanut Butter sandwich, hence the name. I realize that, as a frequent Wiki contributor and user, the setup is a bit sparse but provides–essentially–what needs to be there for an effective wiki experience.

The specific nature of what we’ve been creating doesn’t align perfectly to the capabilities of a wiki. We have been writing field guides and documenting our research (and the progress of it) on a pair of wiki’s (one “process” wiki and one “product” wiki). The primary reason that the professor chose to use a wiki is that he wanted the research aspect to be shared.

As there are a number of different sections of the class (I think two, but it could be more) the potential for overlapping field guides is pretty high. Taking into account the demographics (?) of the people who are in the class, it becomes pretty clear that there is a use to having the research shared. Some of the most popular subjects pertain to sports and music and, for that reason, the resource pages that people find are incredibly useful for people who are researching topics that are in some regards similar.

I think it’s interesting that a teacher is embracing the very technology that so many librarians loathe. In fact, when we were meeting with the research librarians (for a couple sessions, very useful people by the way…) the whole Wikipedia controversy (regarding how useful and accurate it is when putting together a field guide) began to come up. Naturally the librarian (who depends on print encyclopedias and pay-for services to feed himself) was very against our heavy use of the internet and specifically Wikipedia.

Though I am somewhat on the fence about the full usability of Wikipedia, I think that it provides an excellent starting point for people to find information about a wide variety of subjects. I also think that it provides a resource for people who can’t necessarily get to a library that has a 20+ volume set of books that might have what they are looking for somewhere in the thousands of pages. While I would be hesitant to base a large portion of my research upon my findings in Wikipedia, I would not know the basics without it. Additionally, I find quite often that the citation links provide the best information (as well as the “see also” and “external links”).