Organization Monkey

how am i just now learning about the archie mcphee website? they sell monkey items! if you’re looking for a present for a certain organizationmonkey, she may like to have some cocktail monkeys.

thanks, bob!

last week i co-taught an online course on wikis.  i looked through a lot of the ones that were developed in the class to learn what my colleagues around the u.s. were thinking about or working on.  a few wikis stood out to me and i posted them on my blog as a reminder to myself to watch their development.

yesterday i joined in on a giant chat session that focused on the implementation of the new nih public access policy, and what it means to libraries around the nation.  near the end of the time alloted for the chat someone wrote that they weren’t done yet discussing and wondered where a likely place would be to continue with those that were interested.  someone mentioned that a wiki would be a good place to gather documents and have a place to continue chatting.

i realized then that one of the wikis i had been keeping an eye on, http://publishingbiomedresearch.wetpaint.com/, was about that very topic.  i pasted the url into the chat and wrote in that people could gather their documents and thoughts there.  i think it’s great that a wiki that someone developed for their own interest could turn out to be a watering hole for a large group.  this kind of software connects people in unexpected ways.

“ItSpace creates a network of pages within the social networking site MySpace. Instead of featuring people, the pages feature everyday household objects. Each page has a photo of the object, a description, and most importantly, a 1-minute piece of music composed of recordings of the object being struck and resonated in various ways. All the pages, or objects, are ‘friends’ with each other, so that visitors who discover one object may jump to the others by clicking on the ‘friends’ pictures at the bottom of each page.”

link to the project page for itspace: http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/itspace/

i appreciate the creative idea of using an existing social networking site to explore how items might connect with each other.  i think the composer missed out on an opportunity to learn how people may interact with his items and their sounds by not allowing his items to be friended.  this closed approach to a site that is about unexpected connections is too bad.

that said, the sounds the items make are intriguing.  my favorite is the pillow.  the mashup of the bannister and the pillow, the “banillow”, is nice too.

at my library i chair the wiki task force, which was charged in june of 2006 with identifying what wikis could/could not do for the library. the task force put together lists of possible uses for a wiki for each department in our library. we put together the lists using a wiki, of course, to give ourselves experience using the software to see what it was actually like to use. the task force used pbwiki to collaborate, and the results are still available at http://wikitaskforce.pbwiki.com/.

while making the lists of possible uses it became clear that we all wanted a centralized storage area for procedural documentation. in addition, we identified certain things that we look up all the time, like the phone number list, a policy on x, etc. these things seemed natural to develop in a wiki, so the report from the task force was that not only was a wiki feasible for us, we decided to build one.

the health sciences libraries wiki became a creative hot bed of development, with a task force member in each department figuring out which procedures should be posted, how to update them, and what the training needs were. our university provides access to a wiki that is password protected. we looked at other wiki options but decided that this was the best tool for our purposes at the time. each department revised documentation, wrote new documentation, uploaded files and created pages. the wiki is now two years old and still in active use.

the generator blog pointed me to this new drug generator. it’s funny, but not as funny as the postmodern essay generator.

michelle kraft and i are co-teaching week 2 (focusing on wikis) of the 8-week online continuing ed course offered to medical library association members. the major discovery exercise for the week is that each participant creates his own wiki. michelle and i have been impressed with the variety of approaches and ideas the participants have in how a wiki can be used. the goal for the week is to simply start a wiki but many participants have gone to town and really developed a topic and worked with the tool.  here’s a link to the list of wikis that have already been created for the course. warning: over 700 people registered for the course, so the list is likely to get quite long! mla 2.0 101 wikis

my favorite wikis created for the class so far: Penguins, Scholarly Publishing in Biomedical Research Science and the NIH Public Access Policy, Devilishly Handsome Dog Productions