Wiki? What?
I’ve spent the last couple months on wikis: new work project being documented with a wiki, a high school class reunion wiki and now Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth Wiki.
So what is a wiki?
A wiki is a website authored by a group of people. This group of people could be a small closed group; semi open group where the world can read it, but only those people with permission can write; or a group consisting of everyone in the world.
Work group
Our work group wiki is read and authored by small closed group where everyone trialing new learning management systems is recording the problems, successes and general thoughts. This is working well, but could be working much better if we could get everyone to automatically write their thoughts on the wiki before emailing some or all of us.
High School Reunion
A wiki I started for my high school graduation class reunion is open to the world to view, but only those with permission are allowed to put up pages. Again the numbers of contributors is small (about 25 out of a graduating class of 250 minus those who have passed away or whose whereabouts is unknown).
However, this wiki is turning out to be a fun exercise. We have had pages added on missing classmates, cars then and now, class plays, proms, events we went through, a map where people are able to pinpoint where they live today (there are at least 2 of us in Australia) and more. I’ve used wetpaint to create the wiki, and Frappr to create the map. Both of these are free so you might want to try them for many reasons including writing a family history from many perspectives.
Wikipedia
I’ve talked about this wiki before. It’s turning into a wonderful online encyclopedia written by many, many people who continually correct each other. This type of resources drives teachers and librarians wild, but most of the time it works well.
An Inconvenient Truth
Friday, I watched the Al Gore movie (An Inconvenient Truth) at lunch. You could have heard a pin drop in that lecture theatre containing many staff and students. There were so many statistics and pictures from around the world that it would be silly to say that people are not causing global warming and that global warming is not a huge problem needing quick action.
However, I suspect that some facts may not be perfectly presented so I went to the Internet to see what I could find out. I went through pages and pages of research, but could find little credible information to dispute his statistics, so I turned to wikipedia. This site (an inconvenient truth) summarized information well for me and gave me links to additional information and scientists who support Gore’s facts and governments who don’t (mainly Bush and Howard!). There certainly are people, including scientist who dispute some of the facts, but even if only a fraction is correct, I think we need to act now.
The earth has been very forgiving in the past, but in the past we (much fewer of us) had smaller tools, and created less damage. So if panic is not needed, at least great care should be taken!
"I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth."
(Wally Schirra, who flew around Earth on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions in the 1960s).
Useful Websites
http://www.wetpaint.com
http://www.frappr.com/
http://www.wikipedia.com/
http://www.an-inconvenient-truth.com/whatyoucando.html
http://www.realclimate.org/
