I know, I know - my method of following the oh-so-carefully organised and logical steps of the Cam23 2.0 programme has gone from a little bit sporadic to completely haywire, but as I encounted a wiki of mine today, it is perfectly logical for me to head straight to Thing 22 (in my head, anyway...)
Aside from the glorious glut of garbled knowledge that is Wikipedia, which I myself have never contributed to, my experience of wikis pre-Cambridge was nil. Then I arrived here and was slapped with the mammoth task of scanning endless articles and chapters for our (spoilt) classicists' reading lists and putting them onto our VLE, Camtools - a pachyderm-esque piece of software if there ever was one. I dutifully scanned and tweaked and uploaded to Camtools, at which point I discovered ...
...the Wiki.
Dramatic, I know. All Camtools pages have a wiki option, which wasn't being used at all by the Classics library, and I thought it might be a slightly more interesting and friendly way to make all these scanned resources available to the students. Here was the result:
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| My attempt at a Classics resources wiki page |
It's not great, but it's not horrendous either. I wanted all the icons alongside each other, but the software, combined with my limited HTML knowledge at the time, conspired against me.
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Lots and lots of reading for the
finalists! |
But it was at least a good excuse to break up the white space with Raphael's version of Plato and Aristotle in his
Scuola di Atene (if you haven't been to the Vatican to see it, it's well worth it). The pictures relate to some of the core courses in each year, and the link underneath brings up a list of (linked) resources, arranged by course.
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The full Scuola di Atene, if you
were wondering...
Image (appropriately) from Wikipedia |
As Suz points out in her blogpost on this subject, it's a little clunky, and I certainly wouldn't choose a wiki to do anything more sophisticated than bung up a load of documents, but for that precise purpose, it's actually pretty useful...as long as you accept its limitations!
Yes, sometimes a wiki is a lot better than the alternative, especially when the software's built into something like CamTools
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I can understand why you'd want to create your own VLE and all that...but I feel that CamTools just isn't quite there yet.
ReplyDelete