Category: Help

The Commons Wiki and its Uses

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Introduction

The Academic Commons Wiki is a collaborative space where members create and share resources.  This page provides some background information on wikis, and highlights potential uses.

Photo courtesy of cogdogblog (Creative Commons).

Wiki Background

According to Wikipedia, the term “wiki” comes from the “Wiki-Wiki” shuttle buses that connect the terminals at Honolulu International airport.They are quick and simple, open and transparent.

Wikis are easy to use.  You only need some very basic editing skills to quickly add to a page or create a new one. Editing takes place in the browser, and your content is published to the Web immediately upon saving. For more information on how to create or edit pages on our wiki see the Commons FAQ.

A wiki is composed of articles or pages which can be categorized, or “tagged” so that they are part of a group. The Commons wiki has a “Category Cloud” which enables quick access. Not tagging pages makes them harder to find, and discourages collaboration.

Wikis have lots of hyperlinks.  See: Got Cool Links? Share them on our wiki

An Information Repository

A wiki stores information which is collectively created and edited.  Collaboration is encouraged.  The Commons has some very active group wikis.  A nice example is the e-Portfolios Committee.

Open source communities quickly latched onto wikis as effective tools to document their software.  Wikipedia’s success brought further attention to wikis and their ability to function as collective repositories of information. On the Commons wiki we have a category called CUNY ITunes U which contains background information about our campuses’ presence on iTunes U, as well as guidelines and best practices.  For more information, see CUNY iTunes U on our Wiki.

Various file types may be downloaded to our wiki, including pdf, txt, doc, and ppt.  Hyperlinks to these as well as video-embeds to services such as youtube.com and blip.tv make a wiki repository very convenient and immediate.  RSS feeds will soon be available as we continue to work to improve our wiki.

Collaborative Writing

The Commons wiki is great for working on pages that need constant updating, and whose content evolves over time. Changes can be made quickly, and publication is immediate. Groups can collaborate on projects, gather together information, and compile answers to frequently asked questions.  Some examples of ways the Commons wiki is being used include:

  • group projects
  • grant proposals
  • guidelines
  • standard practices
  • sharing lesson plans
  • meeting notes
  • announcements

Teaching with wikis

Wikis have been widely used in education. As an alternative to course management tools such as Blackboard, they allow classes to collaborate and publish writing projects.  50 Ways to use wikis is a good resource which shows the various ways to use wikis in the classroom.

Though the Commons wiki cannot currently support undergraduate course management, graduate level course integration is encouraged.

Underlying Technology

There are many wiki software packages available, mostly open source (see Wikipedia’s List of wikis).  The Creative Commons uses MediaWiki which, like WordPress, is based on PHP and MySql.  MediaWiki has a vibrant user community which tracks defects and develops new releases and extensions which can be added to the program’s core for additional functionality. Thousands of websites are powered partially or totally by wiki technology.  The use of skins often makes wikis difficult to detect.

Other wikis

  • Of course the most well known wiki is Wikipedia. Love it or hate it, it is a cultural phenomenon.
  • ICT For Education Wiki is a worth checking out.  This is a great repository of tutorials, documentation, articles, and projects.  It employs the MediaWiki book tool which allows a user to create a personalized book from the pages of the wiki and then download to a pdf or send to a vendor for physical publication.

Related Pages


Embedding Video with WordTube

From CUNY Academic Commons

As he notes in his “Sandbox” blog, Michael Cripps the WordTube plug-in that Matt loaded in order to load videos into these pages.  He wrote the following about this: 

“Dumping a video on the page is one thing. Getting it to look good by positioning and resizing is something else.  I was able to resize and center the WordTube media upload with a little code.  No sweat, though it would be nicer for students if this could be handled through buttons. But here’s a cheesy caption you might put beneath the video to help students who want to do what I did:

   media=# width=xxx height=xxx

and the code I used to center the media is  

   div style=”text=align:center

Click here to see an example of how this looks on a page that is nested inside the “Courses” area of the WordPress “Sandbox” eportfolio. (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page for the link(s).”

Accessing Neptune

From CUNY Academic Commons

Neptune (neptune.gc.cuny.edu) is a server running the PostgreSQL RDBMS.  Neptune can be accessed via SSH (secure shell) using port forwarding.  Port forwarding configures your local computer to forward all incoming TCP/IP requests on a particular port to a remote computer.  You are basically tricking the client application to think your local computer is a database server, when all it really is is a conduit to the real database server.

In Progress Mediawiki Commons FAQ

From CUNY Academic Commons

Here is a link to the MediaWiki FAQ that we can steal/borrow from:  Especially section 4 which is about basic usage.

Thanks!  So now where is all the stuff that the three of you borrowed? Karen Greenberg 01:10, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

We need to add somewhere that it is very important to save your work when working in the wiki (I learnt this that hard way) since most of us are used to the face that Microsoft word does automatic back-ups (Tziporah stern 03:25, 7 April 2009 (UTC))

Thanks.  I did this when I revised the entire FAQ.Karen Greenberg 01:06, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

What is a wiki? (Tziporah stern 02:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC))

Thanks.  But this is a bit too basic.  And there’s already lots of stuff in the page on wikis and blogs Karen Greenberg

Copying and Loading Images and Animated GIFS

From CUNY Academic Commons

This page is part of Karen_Greenberg’s_Blackboard_Tips_and_Tricks.

To Copy an Online Image, Photo, or Gif (an animated image):

  • Use the right button on your mouse to click anywhere on the image or gif. Click “Save Image As….” or “Save Picture as…”
  • Follow the standard “Save as” dialogue to place the file in whatever directory you choose on your hard disk.
  • Pay attention to the file’s name and which directory you’re putting it in, so you can find it later.

To Change the Size of an Image or a Photo:

  • Open the image in PaintShop of PhotoShop or Microsoft’ s image editing program.
  • Click the resize button at the top of the screen and resize the image to as close to 150 x 150 pixels as you can get (since this is the size that shows best in Bb).
  • Use the Save as command to save the image or photo as a jpeg file (since this is what Bb requires).

To Upload an Image or a Gif as a Banner:

  • Click the Control Panel, click Settings, click Course Design, and click Course Banner.
  • Click Browse… and find the image or gif on your hard drive.
  • Click Submit and click OK.
  • If it doesn’t load, it was not saved as a jpeg file. Resave it with a new name as a jpeg file and then try uploading it again. [Bb requires jpeg images everywhere except when the image is loaded as a “media file” that’s displayed within a page.”

To Upload an Image or an Animated Gif in a Textbox:

Create an item, click Browse, find the image or animated GIF you want and click it, and then click Display media file within the page in the Special Action box. Click Submit. This will bring up the following screen:

Image:MediaFile.jpg

Image:MediaFile 2.jpg

Click Submit.
When you view the result, you will see a line of space above the image.

Image:MediaFile3.jpg

Actually THIS OCCURS WITH ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU TYPE OR PUT INTO A TEXTBOX IN Bb 6. For some quirky reason, the designers decided to put a line of space at the beginning of every textbox; you can’t see this unless you click the HTML. Then you see the paragraph tag (<P>) that creates this space. Often Bb also adds a paragraph tag at the end of what you’ve typed too.

Image:MediaFile4.jpg

I don’t like all this space because it forces students to do even more scrolling than they’re already doing. So I always click the HTML box and delete every <P> that I didn’t want as an actual “begin new paragraph” marker.

Image:MediaFile5.jpg

Back to Blackboard Tips

Sandbox

From CUNY Academic Commons

A sandbox is a testing environment that isolates untested source code changes and outright experimentation from the production environment or repository, in the context of software development including Web development and revision control.

To experiment in the Academic Commons Sandbox click here.

In wikis

Wikis also typically employ a shared sandbox model of testing, though it is intended principally for learning and outright experimentation with features rather than for testing of alterations to existing content (the wiki analog of source code). An edit preview mode is usually used instead to test specific changes made to the texts or layout of wikis pages. In the Academic Commons, a sandbox exists for users to experiment with their ideas and questions.

Sandboxes used in Electronic Literacy Programs

Project Stretch is a traditional and electronic literacy program. It utilizes wiki sandboxes within a MOODLE in order to encourage middle school students to experiment with online media.

References

–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(software_development)