Playing with Wikis...and a day of "rest"

Aaaccckkk! I woke with a horrible sore throat so I decided to lay low today. With my coffee cup near by, and my laptop on an old bedtray that I used to use for my kids, I setup shop in bed. Ah..the joys of wireless!

I decided to spend the day exploring wikis. I had taken an online workshop and had listened to a podcast aabout the great benefits of wikis but today I would use PBWIKI to create one of my own.

From ALA midwinter's wiki, I had entered my blog int their blogger's site, so it looked fairly easy. I was going to update and create a new resources page for the Council of Chief Librarians (California Community Colleges.)

After creating the page, I copied the old html page from our website and pasted it into thw iki. Voila! All of the formatting and links came along and I had my menu page. Then by using th easy wysiwug editor, I created a new page for each link, going back to my original html page to capture the new information. Unbelievaly easy. There were a few formatting issues but I played around with that and a few hours later, voila! http://cclresources.pbwiki.com/

I started thinking of other links and information resources we could provide. I went back to our newsletter and started to add information. Often we ask the same questions every oher year or so like :how many hours a week are your librarians contracted to work," "where do you advertize for new librarian recruitment?" How wonderful it would be to expand this wiki into a mre dynamic vehicle for community college librarians in the state.

My vision:
Tenders of the wiki (key people who will look after a topic and feed it, nurture it...) Information competency issues, succession leadership issues, new buildings in the state, legislative updates, etc. Although the beauty of a wiki is the opn, collaborative part, it would be great to have someone looking in occasionally to check on it.

The same day I did a wiki for Pasadena City Colleges, Tech Plan Writing Group (which I lead) as well as birthday wiki for my daughter's 30th birthday (people are contributing stories about her and I will present it to her on her birthday." I also did an ideas wiki for myslef where I can just capture all of the things that I want to pursue but don'thave time right now...

I am convinced that these wikis are limitless! And they are free for basic wikis.
Try it next time you are sick in bed ;-)