was there life before wikis?

The next few posts that I complete will come from the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie Sandifer.  Hopefully through exploring this book I will learn how I can use wikis more effectively in a classroom setting and I can apply these skills to my future classroom.  The first chapter in her book just talks about life before wikis and kind of points out some of the ways that we used to organize and keep information that may seem a little outdated.  She basically wants educators to think about if they are really achieving in terms of "educating all people".  Is there a better way than how we used to do things?  What could be more useful than having binders of paper that you barely open and could spend hours looking through to find one specific paper?  The main intent of her message was to push people to openly embrace using the wikis and internet.  With all this talk of collaboration and sharing are we really doing just that or are we all talk and no action?  To have effective systems we have to be aware of the complexity that actually makes up these systems and just understand them more deeply.  With our learning about wikis and how they are set up and the way that school systems utilize them or don't utilize them we can come to appreciate them more deeply and may one day be able to use them in our own classroom.  So I guess for me I start this book hoping that I can understand this more complex system of how these internet hot spots work.  And hopefully by the end of this book I will have an idea of how I could execute this in my own classroom and maybe even help my future school system understand the value behind using wikis and other similar technologies in my own classroom.  This first chapter was really short and brief, but it did a good job building up my anticipation for what I will read in the rest of the book.