Week #7, Thing #16, Wikis

I checked out the School Libraries in the Blogging Libraries Wiki. I thought it was interesting that many of the libraries were international. Many times when clicking on a link, you would find that the blog had not been active for a year or more. It makes me wonder if any of the blog hosting services have a policy about inactive blogs - perhaps a crawler that cleans them out? Anyway, I found a couple of add-ons (widgets maybe?) that I can't wait to try to add to my blog. They were Feedjit, a real-time traffic feed listing visitor city and state along with how you navigated to the blog, and ClustrMaps.

When I checked out the sample school page, I liked the disclaimer at the bottom of the page that stated not to ask to join if you were not a student at their school. I also checked out the library instruction wiki and found a great wiki on Library 2.0, but the creator had to move it to a different location due to issues with spam.

Applications for libraries and schools:

• This would be great to create pathfinders for both teachers and students
• You could hold book discussions and use it in preparation for reading competitions
• It would provide a great place for communication between school and home - no more excuses that you couldn't remember what homework you had
• Great place for online discussions/responses, plus it eliminates paper