Some comments…
February 6th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisYes, actual comments from some other blogs, reproduced here for your reading pleasure. This is in large part due to my not having a whole lot of time right now. After class all day Saturday (School Law), my Sunday was spent finalizing responses to a soon to be released interview. Then, after catching up on my reading this morning, I found myself spending what time I had responding instead of writing. So here is what has been on my mind…
Will Richardson had an interesting piece this morning about a Reuter’s article that quoted a “fact” from Wikipedia. The question was, what does it mean when newspaper articles are using Wikipedia as a resource? I went and did some research, and was able to find an independant verification (and probable source) for the Wikipedia article. Will then took me to task for leaving out the most important step.
The bigger question now, Chris, is did you go in and add the reference link on the post in Wikipedia??? ;0) Seems like after doing the research, somebody should!
So, the edited article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoa. Thank you, Will, for reminding us of the final followthrough step that makes Wikipedia work!
My other commenting for the morning was in response to some conversation about a post on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog – Blogs? Blogs? We don’t need no stinkin’ blogs!. A previous commenter noted some reservations about blogging in schools:
“And, ultimately, which is more valuable? A blog or working with students and teachers? A wiki or a great collection and delivering instruction? If it comes to a choice, I know where my priorites are – I suspect I’m not alone.” (Laura)
My response mirrored a response I often used in talking about using educational technology. I often told teachers that I wasn’t asking them to take a week out of class to use technology, but rather to use it in class. I suggested that Laura might want to look at the Pacific Middle School Library Bookblog to see an example of blogging “in the library.” Blogs and wikis are just websites running special software, we can select the purpose and the content for them so they can certainly be about the library. As I said:
If you get a lot of materials requests on the same topics, maybe you could use a wiki to create a set of online pathfinders. The wiki technology makes them very easy to update, and since they are online you can access them anywhere without worrying about files. Have a secondary student helper or a library student working with you? Have them work on updating the pathfinders and use wiki technology to hold the updates for review before publication.
Blogs can work the same way. As Jacquie said, they can be used to share information with teachers. If you couldn’t get students to contribute (and I bet they would love to) with a commitment of about 5 minutes a day you could have a “Book a Day Blog” to highlight your collection development activities. Remember, marketing what you are doing is sometimes more important than just doing!
So, while this tends to be a higher level review of some of my thoughts on school libraries (slightly removed from a school library setting), there is no reason that another school library blog can’t be used as an announcements page for the specific use of the library’s students and staff.
Blogs and wikis are just tools. In the end, they are what we make of them. If, as Will reminded me, we write about Wikipedia and forget to take the final step of correcting it, then we are not making the most of the tool. If we see blogs as just being about the mindless drivel that tends to be found on MySpace or Xanga (or even about the often too “mindy” and wordy stuff found here =) ) , then we aren’t making the most of that tool either.