LIBR 246-12: Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools (Fall 2008)

I have to confess that I have wiki fever. I love creating wikis, adding pages, uploading files and images, and deciding how I want to organize the various pages and content. Over the summer the other circulation technician and I migrated our physical manual into a wiki. It gave me some great experience. As we approach accreditation in the spring, our library director is requiring the rest of the staff to create policy/procedure wikis (Oh, no! What have I started?!). Some of the staff is a little reluctant in tackling this new technology. We use a wiki for our meeting agendas and minutes as well as our calendar, but that's pretty basic. I recently had my annual evaluation, and I was pleased that our director noted that I was very proactive in incorporating new technologies into my work. Soooo, with our recent experience in creating screencasts, I have even more of an interest in wikis and teaching the other staff how to create and edit them. I know PBWiki already has some great tutorials, but I think if I create my own screencasts, I can tailor them to our specific needs--and in particular some of our more reluctant staff. Since our schedules don't always coordinate to meet each other easily, screencasts could be accessible to anyone at anytime. Also, people can pause the video and work at their own pace. However, as I've learned from this class, before I bring up this idea, I'm going to create a prototype so that I have an example to show to our director. Now I think my wiki fever is accompanied by screencast flu!