I’ve been on holiday for a week, and so missed the ‘wiki’ week of the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial. I’m playing catchup now, and have setup a page in the Wetpaint wiki that has been setup for the course – it’s members only I’m afraid.

Although many participants in the course have created a wiki page, I feel that a focus to the wiki activity would have been helpful. It seems to me that getting each person to setup a wiki page really is similar to the ‘create a blog’ exercise, and doesn’t encourage the collaborative working that wikis are ideal for.

The course organisers put together a list of all the participants, with their MSN account and blog details (these were setup in week 1) – I’d suggest that asking people to enter their own details into the wiki would have demonstrated the way a collaborative effort can work. Perhaps also a community Q and A page for the programme – where people on the course can both post questions, and answers, to get a sense of community to emerge.

We already have some great examples of using wikis in the library – the Spiral project, and the IRD team have used it to create documentation (two members of the IRM team comment on how well the wiki works for their documentation either on their wiki page or on their blogs), and I’ve used it for some brainstorming around the creation of a digital library strategy (something that I really need to get back to soon). These all use wiki software called Confluence which is supported by Imperial’s ICT service. Confluence is essentially a wiki, but also supports a few other functions, like blogs.

We have also started to try out ‘Sharepoint’ – a collaboration tool from Microsoft – this supports a wide range of different types of collaboration, including wiki-type functions – this is currently being trialled by the Learning Development team in the library.

What we haven’t done in the library at Imperial (yet) is try using wikis in a user-facing environment. The kind of thing we could look at is creating documentation which can be edited and updated by students – so that we can see some peer-to-peer support going on. I’m not sure if this would be successful – it may be that students are happy to share with their peers in other environments (in the cafe, on Facebook etc.) rather than in an ‘official’ library environment – but it would be an interesting experiment…