Unfortunately I wasn't at Maurice's talk, so my right to muse here is shaky at best – but as an instructor who has run a bunch of wikis in classes, I’ve become increasingly interested in the question of their durable value.

We have to figure out what to think of these projects after the party’s over, the collaboration’s ended, the class is dispersed – that will drive decisions about whether and how to archive class wikis, which in turn defines their overall worth. For some teachers, the cultivation of an atmosphere of collaboration during a class might be enough to justify the effort it takes to use this tool – but I suspect that there’s a significant slice of instructors who would want to have a class feel that it was doing something built to last.

The model John discusses is one approach to an afterlife: students pitch into a wiki that expands over several classes. A repository of information grows, of use to a larger community. It sounds like Professor Kelley is choosing different patches to develop with each class. The wiki will become an increasingly comprehensive aggregation of student research in the field, developed across institutions and over time.

Here’s another model: at Bowdoin I taught the same literature class (essentially), once in 2003 and once in 2005; both classes built wikis. Since I was having students work with many of the same texts both times, I starting thinking that it would be great if a ‘core’ wiki were built for this recurring course, with the ability to overlay ‘instances'. Thus I could choose to look at the ‘clean’, unmarked wiki; the wiki as marked by class A, the wiki as marked by class B, or the wiki as marked by both class A & class B…. This scenario would only suitable for some kinds of classes, and would depend on some solid, persistent coding.... but I think it could lead to some intriguing comparisons and perhaps even cross-class dialogue.

Finally, even putting aside these multi-class scenarios, I think there’s a good argument for the enduring value of well-executed class wikis. I guess it does comes down to what you’re regarding as “valuable documents” or “ongoing information resources.” There are sociological, pedagogical, institutional reasons for seeing how a given class, at a given time and place, treated a subject. Imagine if materials from a related class at Columbia thirty years ago, say, were readily and comprehensively available as cultural artifacts. I can’t help thinking that access to such a record would intrigue current students, sharpen a sense of their own cultural moment, spur class discussion, and maybe even get them thinking about the evolution of the institution they’re attending.

I've been working with several faculty at Columbia using wikis in their classes and the context/content divide is something we've faced with every implementation. Certainly the activity--working in a collaborative space--is one of the key pedagogical angles for using a wiki in the classroom. However, I have recently worked on a wiki project where the final product also has great value.

Last spring we released a wiki in Robin Kelley's undergraduate course Black Movements in the U.S.. Throughout the semester, eighty students developed the content of a collaborative web site about key social justice movements in the United States. The Social Justice Movements wiki provided the students the opportunity to create a web site exploring the broader political visions of organizations representing labor, civil rights, black liberation, reparations, socialism/communism, feminism, welfare rights, youth/Hip Hop activism, education, peace, environmental justice, and anti-globalization and their impact on local communities.

Context (or better yet, process) was crucial for implementing the wiki in Kelley's course. At the same time, Kelley from the very beginning had an interest in transforming the work done by his class into a publicly accessible web site for students, scholars and other individuals looking for information on various activist organizations in the U.S.. Similarly, the public version of the Social Justice wiki would allow the various organizations an online presence--many of the organizations that the students produced pages for had no web presence before Kelley's course. The wiki is now viewable by anyone online.

http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu

Users can edit the site like any other wiki when provided with a username and password by Kelley. As of today, Kelley has given editing privileges to all original members of his Black Movements class as well as selected members of the organizations listed in the site.

Following the recent public release of the Social Justice wiki, Kelley is now re-purposing the site for his upcoming Black Intellectuals seminar. Kelley is teaching this seminar at both Columbia and Harvard this fall semester. Instead of focusing on organizations--the assignment for the Black Movements lecture class in the spring 2005--the Columbia and Harvard seminars will instead focus on individuals. Kelley is requiring both seminars to work collaboratively in the Social Justice wiki space: specifically, to build pages on activist individuals and connect them to the already created categories applied for the organization pages. The work in the wiki site will support the individual research papers students from both seminars will be submitting at the end of the semester.

Herz's comments are a little provocative. As Maurice explained in the session, the Three-C's (collaboration, communication, community -- I think) are a big value that results from the use of this kind of social software and social networking, but that they are not *substitutes* for the fourth C -- CONTENT, which is also tremendouly important. My own feeling is that the *activity* this technology enables is inherently valuable for teaching and pedagogy, and should be promoted for that reason, but that the actual *products* of that activity (like collaborative web pages, weblogs, wiki-pedias, transcripts of IM sessions, etc.) are not necessarily valuable as documents or as ongoing information resources, because the latter requires appropriate/structured/evaluated content. In other words, building a wiki can be a great learning exercise for a community (and ideally can help to CREATE a community), but the wiki itself that results from that effort isn't necessarily a great resource (in the sense of other content-oriented information resources a library might collect and provide access to.)

So, I guess I would complete (and expand) what Herz says, something like this:

"It's the activity -- not the code or the content -- that provides value as an educational exercise. And it is content -- not the code or the activity -- that provides a durable *product* whose information value extends beyond the community that created it."

I'd love to make the E-Resources News into a simple blog and make an RSS feed available in the process.

I believe SIRSI has a RSS feed component available, though Endeavor I believe is also talking about it.

link: http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2005/01/19/sirsi_breaks_open_the_rss_flood_gates.html

Does anyone know of any libraries that use RSS feeds with their online catalogs? It seems like it might be a way to allow a scholar to periodically query a catalog with a canned search.

Check out:

http://www.backbase.com/demos/RSS/

An interesting AJAX-based reader...

A conversation about realtime chat is not complete without mention of irc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat). This technology is basically an IM chatroom, where multiple users can all converse at once. Typically, a "channel" is kept alive 24/7, and participants can leave and join at will. Many geographically dispersed projects live and breathe on irc.

In educational contexts, I have even heard of irc being used within the classroom. (aka - the backchannel, sometimes even projected on the wall - http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/03/15/backchannel_modes.php)

The rationale is that if students are going to be on their computers chatting, might as well attempt to redirect them to side conversations with their classmates that are more likely to be related to the topic at hand. I understand this strategy may be controversial, since it concedes the multiple attention tracks, but it is happening.

IM has pedagogical uses too -- we're using it this semester to power a live video feed between policital science classes at Columbia and Stanford. The classes will meet at the same time each week to engage in a debate. The only special technology we're using is a conventional webcam (< $100), free IM software, and our broadband Internet connection.

When I was acting head of Circulation & Access, Library Information staff, the head of Circulation and I were all on IM. It was invaluable to be able to hear the gist of a problem even just slightly in advance of an unhappy patron arriving at your office. Right now 3 of us are involved in a project that requires quick discussions and decisions about a new service. After Maurice's presentation, we are all frustrated with the clunkiness of e-mail for this sort of project work and wish we had IM.

I found IM to be a very handy way of asking quick questions to geographically dispersed colleagues at my former workplaces. cuts down on the quickie emails, and is great for sharing citations, searches and whatnot with troubleshooting problems.

Inspired by Maurice's presentation, Dmitri and I are going to try using IM on Fridays when he telecommutes. The adjacency of our cubicles allows us to be in constant communication Mondays-Thursdays. We think IM will be the next best thing on Fridays when Dmitri works from home.

IM is such an interesting and versatile tool. There's another application that might be of interest as a support tool (e.g. for computer or library IM support). There's an application called SmarterChild (AIM username: smarterchild) that will answer questions. So, for example, if you type "what's the weather like in New York" and the little SmarterChild robot returns "Current weather conditions for New York, NY:... [with the info]"... and it's pretty accurate. What if students could ask ReferenceLibrarian "Where is call number PK1403.b2.2002?" ... and it told her instantaneously?