Suffering from typing fatigue – today I’ve blogged, wikied, IMed and actually talked and listened. Part of the point of today was to look at all these technologies and their use, and I feel like I’ve given them a pretty good workout.
I remain to be convinced that wikis will take off. It seems to me that most of the use of wikis today could have been much better served by blogs and Instant Messaging. In terms of interacting with the conference, the using of IM was the newest to me, and also I think the most useful – although it was a shame their were only a handful of people using the chatrooms (although their were obviously technological problems – perhaps proof that this isn’t ready for the real world yet)
Although I’ve also been blogging this, it was nice to be able to discuss what the presenters were saying as they said it. Also to ask questions – which others are able to answer. Given a choice, I’d have preferred to concentrate on IM, and then use transcripts for the basis of a published report afterwards.
I sort of came to the opposite conclusion but then having just read the chat transcripts I obviously started concentrating on the Wiki just as the IM chat rooms took off and started to become useful/interesting!
I think on the day more stuff went into the wiki. However, this was all basically of a ‘discussion board’ nature. We could have run this as a set of discussion boards as much as a wiki I think. I’d be interested to know if anyone edited someone elses post, rather than just adding their own comment. I corrected a single spelling mistake, but otherwise left other peoples content alone.
My feeling is that there’s probably not a best solution – rather people will use the tool they are familiar with. The preferences on the day may well reflect the tools people used on the few days prior to the event.
Note, though, there is an issue about finding the information. Discussions about the workshop are split across Wikis, IM transcripts, Blogs, comments on t Blogs, etc. This is fine for experimenting on the day but there is probably a need for selection of the tools for use in a service context.