Wikis

I'm still trying to wrap my feeble little brain around this wiki business, but I think I've found a wiki that will work for the media center at the high school that I (as of this afternoon) used to work at.

Population served: Approximately 800 high school students at a Title I school in Middle Georgia.

Library Type: Media Center

Budget: Nonexistent

Goal: To make the Media Center more useful and market its usefulness to students and faculty.

My choice: Clearspace.

Here's the specs on the wiki:

Much more than just an application wiki, Clearspace makes collaborating across teams, departments, even with customers easy, fast and a powerful way to refine ideas and remain productive. Clearspace is a single application that unifies lots of content types like wiki-documents, blog, discussions, instant messaging, rss, email integration, files (and a lot more) into spaces organized by topic vs being just another, bolted-on point solution. Even more, Clearspace provides easy workflow, file management and heavy-duty enterprise J2EE software with clustering, permissions, moderation, and is completely developer-source so you own full access to the code to easily integrate it into your current environment. Find out why Clearspace has quickly made Jive Software “the most important tech company you’ve never heard of.”

Based on the description from the website, this would be a great resource for cross curriculum planning among teachers as well as an excellent resource for students within the same class. Social Studies teachers that are covering Ancient Rome would be able to find and make a connection with World Literature teachers that are covering Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Students within the same class could be assigned group discussion topics and be personally responsible for posting on this discussions.