Tag Archives: wikis

#GlowScot Wiki Warm Ups⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

  

Over in the day job, most of my energy is spent on Glow Blog. I am also acting as ‘product owner’ for Glow Wikiis too. The went live with little fanfare in January and have been ticking along ever since.

We are now about to offer some support in using the wikis to interested teachers and classes. This support will take two different tacks, one aimed at individual staff and the other at classes.
The support will be online, through Glow Meet, documentation and some wiki tasks.

The Staff support will consist of a Glow Meet going over the basic of wikis and some practise in wiki editing supported, if needed, by the meet.

The class support will be for classes with an idea of what they want to do. A wiki will be set up and the pupils initially introduced in the same way as the staff. Ongoing dialog with the class will be kept up in their wikis discussion.

You can read more on a page the main Glow Wiki: Wiki Warm Ups where there is a link to register interest, help decide dates etc.

I feel wikis are Glows secret weapon, their simplicity and ease of use offering an quick way into online collaboration, collective publishing and more.

We probably need to give more thought and discussion as to why you would use a wiki as opposed to a blog, OneNote or a SharePoint group and I hope to think aloud about that here soon.

Wikispaces for Glow⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

WIKI

Photo credit: WIKI by Kevin Baird, on Flickr Creative Commons — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Along side the blog migration for Glow I’ve been working on the wiki procurement. Wikis were part of the services added to Glow in 2010 (AFAIR) along with blogs and forums. When it came to think about the new services and migration wiki migration was not in the plans and wikis were not on the map of new services.

The previous wiki solution was not particularly well used, around 4000 wikis were created over the projects lifetime (compare to >130,000 blogs). The software behind the wikis was mindtouch. This is now discontinued and I believe missed a few features that make wikis useful in the classroom. These included nice themes and a simple workflow for uploading and embedding images.

It was decided to look at the possibilities for continuing to have wikis as part of the glow offering. This might seem counter intuitive as O365 sharepoint sites can be though of as Wikis and certainly have wiki pages as part of sites. I think a separate wiki offers a simpler way of building on the internet and it is also important to have the facility to make a wiki public in some instances.

Personally I’ve had enough success with children publishing publicly on the internet that that would be my default position. Other teachers and educators may prefer closed environments and glow can provide for both.

As part of the process of provisioning wikis we evaluated many different solutions, wikispaces stood out as the best fit for our needs1. Wikispaces was also mentioned frequently by the folk who responded to our wiki survey. No other product was mentioned favourably.

As part of procurement three different vendors were invited to tender and their tenders evaluated against a set of requirements. Wikispaces were the best fit and their tender has been accepted.

It has been a while since I used wikispaces in the classroom but it looks like they have added a lot of classroom specific features to the service without over complicating the process. I am not exactly sure of how the wikis will connect up to glow but look forward to working on that development in the coming weeks.

I had a brief look through my bookmarks for interesting wikis which might give you an idea of how to use one:

As always I’d be interested to see how learners and teachers in Scotland are or would use wikispaces.

Footnotes:

1. Personally I like wikitext and enjoyed using wikis that are not WYSIWYG but I think I am in a minority on that one.

Serendipitous Searching!⤴

from @ If You Don't Like Change…

I’ve found a great little iPad app for accessing Wikipedia. It’s simple enough to use, but I really like it because it introduces a wonderful level of spontaneous discovery that could just be enough to help you over a case of writer’s block… or at least keep you entertained for longer than you meant. More importantly, it would be a fabulous tool to have on a school iPad for learners to use.

The tool is WikiLinks and is one of the best (ie: prettiest) Apps for accessing Wikipedia on the iPad that I’ve found so far (My copy of Discover has stopped working on my iPad 1, so I needed something else). The ability to access Wikipedia and save the pages for offline reference would have been reason enough to recommend the App, but it has a truly wonderful visual element that encourages one to delve further into a topic with a simple tap of the screen.

Rather than engage in a fruitless attempt to describe what the App does, here are a couple of screengrabs that will show you (see, I remembered that the key to good writing is “show, don’t tell”!):

The visual links suggested are not always obviously related, which encouraged me to tap on them to find out more… and before I knew it, I was transported into all sorts of loosely related and (to me) fascinating backwaters of learning. I was completely engaged in reading and learning in a way that reminded me of the time I first encountered a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

The available tools are shown in this grab:

For me, WikiLinks is a great example of an App that encourages deeper learning, shows what could be possible when we are allowed to access online tools in school, and that demonstrates that sometimes the nature of the technology does allow us to work in newer ways.

All in all, WikiLinks is highly recommended — and especially as it’s currently reduced to only £1.49 The price is back up to £2.49, but, it is still well worth it… especially as it’ll also run on your iPhone/iPod Touch! Visit the developer’s website for more information: WikiLinks.net. Enjoy.

Free Wikis For Higher Education⤴

from @ TecnoTeach

Fantastic news - Wikispaces are now providing free spaces for Higher Education without all the advertising.

http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/highered

I have used wikispaces for rather a long time in education and the value of this tool to provide a window to the world for communication, collaboration and creativity is huge.  You don't get many things in life for free but this is one of those gems that should be treasured and appreciated otherwise it will come lost in the mine.

Why use a wiki?⤴

from @ TecnoTeach

Wikis work where they are enable asynchronous collaboration with different time/ different place creating an inter-subjective space that glues the collaborative learning together.  In the previous post I described how wikis can be used as a web page/ show page of work children have created.  My collaborative project, Voices Of the World is testimony to this style, a collaborative showcase of what children create around the world.  Children working together, different time and place, to learn from one another.


This type of collaboration fits into areas of the two types of activities that Larusson & Alterman (2009) refer to as: tightly coupled activities and loosely coupled activities.

Tightly Coupled Activities - connect to create shared products.  Students must stay coordinated and focus on key materials.

Loosely Coupled Activities - connect but do not need an end product.  Not every contribution must be recognised.

VOTW relates to the Tightly Coupled Activity in that schools around the world must adhere to the rules of the monthly task to create a product that children around the world will be able to listen to and understand.  The Loosely Coupled Activities relates to the aspect where not all schools have to contribute every month.  This is where collaborative projects, with a large amount of collaborators can either get it right or wrong.  If you force people to contribute then they will leave, if you leave people to contribute when they want there is a possibility that no contributions are given.  A balance between to the types of activities is required to ensure all are comfortable in the level of participation required.

Two questions to ask in any computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments:

* Did students learn?
* Did technology support collaboration

A third question I would add:

* Could the learning and collaboration occur successfully without the technology?

If you can answer yes to the above questions then you are using the correct tool for the job.