Week 7 (session 16)

Hi there,

This week we learnt about Wikis. I suppose I had always thought about Wikis in terms of wikipedia and it was interesting to see them as a more general way for group decision making to work. It seems like it would work best when a group has some clear pieces of information to share or a specific task to work together on.

In this respect, I think wikis would be a use for libraries, especially in group decision-making processes. For example, if a team were organising an event at one of the libraries they could each contribute ideas of what they need to get done and then divide the tasks amongst themselves, without having to send countless emails (which could get more confusing). At the end of the day, they would have a wiki that clearly showed what they had decided and could therefore be used to keep everyone on task.

Then again, I suppose teams could just as easily have a meeting to decide such issues. Though I suppose a wiki is something that can be constantly updated (unlike a meeting which is likely to only be once a week at most).

The Auckland Public Library wiki seems more about sharing information and seems like a great place to get an idea bout what is going on day-by-day throughout the libraries.