Posts Tagged wiki
Wikis as a Learning Environment (at least as part of it)
Posted by enzofsilva in eLearning 2.0 on October 17, 2008
Wikis offer a great opportunity for collaboration. Both as self-hosted or as a subscription service, there are many wiki engines to choose from and Wikimatrix makes it easier to compare them side-by-side.
As says this entry from Wikipedia itself:
“A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.[1][2] Wikis are often used to create collaborativewebsites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.[2] Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.[3]
“Wiki” (/wiːkiː/) is a Hawaiian word for “fast”[4]. “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication. “Wiki” can be expanded as “What I Know Is,” but this is a backronym.”
In the case of a class or workshop being delivered via a wiki platform, the instructor/facilitator has full access to page history information to see who adds/edits content and what exactly was contributed by each individual.
For businesses, wikis, in their essence, offer an intuitive and easy to update knowledge management system and document collaboration tool, harnessing the collective intelligence of many to provide just-in-time, just-enough, just-for-me information.
Peanut Butter Wiki
Posted by enzofsilva in eLearning 2.0 on October 15, 2008
There are many wiki engines out there, see Wikimatrix’s comparison tool. Some have corporate-geared features and storage space, others are more appealing to school educators and students. Some are engines for people willing to run them on their own servers, others are on a domain/subdomain basis.
Out of all those, one seems to appeal to me a lot: Peanut Butter Wiki (or PBwiki). Simple to use, feature-rich and now with a lot more storage for the free accounts, PBwiki has no ads and is unbeatable in the feature arena. Very clean and user-friendly interface.
Despite the name (that I am not really fond of – it doesn’t say much about a “wiki” – but hey…), this is a great tool to consider for both business, academic and personal collaborative projects. (You can upgrade to a custom domain name).
Alternate Second Life Viewers
Posted by enzofsilva in eLearning 2.0 on September 12, 2008
Many people complain about Second Life’s drain on processor performance.
Linden Labs created this wiki page with alternative Second Life viewers that might be of interest to those trying to experiment with Second Life. Some of them claim offer a cleaner, easier to navigate user interface.
I am experimenting with some right now and will let you know (Mac users) my opinion about them. Other Mac users and also Windows users are more than welcome to post their favorites and opinions here as well.
User-generated Encyclopedias Supervised by Experts
Posted by enzofsilva in eLearning 2.0 on July 14, 2008
An interesting concept employed by Citizendium for instance, is that the crowds generate the content, but the “experts” inspect it for accuracy. Which brings more credibility and a more vast array of information. Since the “experts” will mostly “correct” minor errors, there is ore time to be dedicated to more content generation.
The “crowdsourcing” element combined with the expert review side of it creates an interesting approach to the credibility issue in realm of user-generated content (especially that of encyclopedia-like environments)..
Any chance there could be something like Citizendium in educational environment that takes this approach? An environment to which users would add/edit/review content based on their “status” within the community? Multi-media content such as embedded videos, slideshows, images, flash objects would also enrich that environment… The media as an aid to learning, not as a means purely…
Social Media Assessment and Learner Progress Tracking
Posted by enzofsilva in eLearning 2.0 on May 29, 2008
Something that has bothered me is that, while the adoption of social media (Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networks and so on) depends on a paradigm shift and require a new way of thinking “learning”, how can we assess learner progress in a modality of tools in which user-generated content can be so scattered throughout different tools? I know you might be thinking as you read: “But these are new tools, they require a new way for evaluation, progress tracking and certification…” just like I said above. But the problem is that the adoption of the tools seems to happen at a faster speed than the attitude change toward learning assessment and certification!
Instructional Designers, instructors, learners are using social media more and more to enrich learning experiences and more research is needed concerning assessment and progress tracking in this context.
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