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36 DttP 33 (2008)
Mashing Congress: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Teach Congressional Research

handle is hein.journals/dttp36 and id is 95 raw text is: FEATURE Mashing Congress Using Web 2.0 Tools to Teach Congressional Research Karen Munro and Jesse Silva C ongressional publications can be some of the most dif- ficult pieces of information to track down, yet they pro- vide a wealth of information for almost any researcher. Many students and members of the public get lost trying to find the diverse types of publications that the U.S. Congress creates in doing its work: Senate reports, House documents, or debates and speeches that took place on the floor of Congress two days, ten months, or more than a hundred years ago. At the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), we started talking about new ways to help researchers find their way through the maze of congressional documents. Over time, these conversations led to the creation of a mashup, which is a web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Our mashup consists of screencast tutorials and live databases (along with some other helpful information) to instruct students, the public, and library staff on the basics of using databases and paper indexes to find congressional publications. This article will discuss the technology and learning theory underlying the tool. Behind the Scenes: Building the Mashup The Wiki Framework Librarians and researchers are familiar with Wikipedia and its democratic publishing style, where anyone can easily edit, delete, or revert the text to a former version. So far, this aspect of web-based wiki publishing seems to have received the most press. However, Wikipedia is not the only way to utilize wiki software. Wikis also offer a quick, user-friendly way to preview and publish web content, along with a wealth of tools and plu- gins. And there is more than one way to skin a wiki: by apply- ing a predefined skin to our wiki, we created a flexible, turnkey layout with great potential for interactivity. Rather than use the wiki as a platform for radical trust and user-created content, we locked it down and created a framework that houses Flash tutorials, live web sites, RSS feeds to bring in current news, and a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE, otherwise known as a Google Co-op) that searches congressional and related web sites. We used PmWiki, the wiki software supported by the UC Berkeley Library, for the framework of the tool (www.pmwiki .org). One important aspect of working with a wiki is the dif- ference between editing the wiki on the server side and editing the wiki on the client side. Editing on the server side allows you to add functionality across the whole site, while editing on the client side, for the most part, allows you to add functional- ity and/or text to a single page or sidebar. The edits that most users are most familiar with-edits to content on Wikipedia pages, for example-are client-side edits. However, creating the mashup tool required edits to both the client and server side of our wiki. The three main means of editing a wiki are: editing the text (client side), editing the skin (client and server side), and adding recipes from the cookbook (client and server side). The skin governs the layout of the wiki, as well as its look and feel. PmWiki offers several different skins, and you can create your own unique skin with some knowledge of CSS and PHP. Our site uses the preformatted Triad skin, which allows us to display the mashup content in three collapsible columns. The tutorial menu displays in one sidebar and RSS feeds of current congressional information display in another. One PmWiki feature we found particularly useful is the ability to configure the sidebars, header, and footer of the wiki using the built-in skin config link. We used this to add text and links to the various components of the tool. Figure 1 shows a view of the mashup home page, with the three columns clearly visible. Browsers and other applications use plugins to add spe- cific kinds of functionality-for example, to view Flash videos, Discuss this article on the wiki: http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP DttP Summer 2008 33

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