Calgary – First ventures

First stop on this whirlwind virtual library tour:
University of Calgary – Doucette Library of Teaching Resources This is one of the first university libraries in Canada to use a wiki. They apparently also have a Prairie Chicken sculpture!

Photo taken by D’Arcy Norman

It’s an easy path from the University of Calgary Library page to the Doucette Library to their wiki.
They cover several topics in their wiki:
Resources for Education
Children’s Literature (booklists, teaching guides and a webguide!)
Cool Teaching Links

Now I may be demonstrating some bias here, but this is a great wiki: nice layout, sleek design, booklists, (with pictures of book covers) and a webguide. Good usability. It was created using Mediawiki.

It seems to fit well with the rest of the Doucette Library Site. These folks are clearly up on their Web 2.0. They are using del.icio.us for their bookmarks. The Children’s Literature index provides useful teaching suggestions for specific books that you can search by title. The Doucette Library wiki is part of a larger University of Calgary Wiki.
As with many wikis, content depends on the number of contributors and their individual expertise. The booklists were quite short. In some places the quality varies a little. Some of the links do not lead anywhere, and others make you jump through several hoops (and take a survey!) to get to the article.
As with many on-line resources, this could benefit from having someone (or someones) go through the links and fix the rotten ones, and clean it up a little.

The Inquiry Page

If I were an Education Student or a teacher at large, I would use this site – it contains so much useful information. It would probably be especially useful for ESL teachers or home schoolers.