_Educause Review_: Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not

[Gerry Mckiernan]

Colleagues/

Wikis In The News:

Educause Review: Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not

In 1999, the World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked back on the previous decade and lamented: "I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying 'interactive,' and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was 'interactive,' meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity." That vision of a genuinely interactive environment rather than "a glorified television channel"*one in which people not only would browse pages but also would edit them as part of the process*did not disappear with the rise of the read-only Web browser.1 It's churning away more actively than ever, in a vivid and chaotic Web-within-the-Web, via an anarchic breed of pages known as "wikis."

[ http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp  ]

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Anarachic  Librarian 
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu