Category: Wikis

Educational Wikis

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

7 Things You Should Know About Wikis This article explains how students–and faculty–can use wikis to collaborate on.

Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools This webtext focuses on the use of wiki as a tool for writing and for teaching writing. (by Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern)

Teaching and learning online with wikis from the conference proceedings of the ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) in 2004. Pretty basic and focused on online teaching, but a good overview (it’s early–2004 is a long, long time ago in internet time).

Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool From the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Very comprehensive, and includes both wikipedia and using your own wikis in class. And also provides a good overview of other research.

50 Ways to use wikis Great suggestions on how to use wikis in the classroom.

Three Wiki Uses The author breaks wiki use down into three general categories: knowlege repositories, collaborative writing and situation awareness.

Using Group Wikis Online Bill Ashton, from York College, posts an in-depth presentation about using group wikis online on one of his blogs on the Commons, Things I say to my BlackBoard students. Also included in Bill’s June, 2012 post are links to his group wiki grading rubrics and a screencast overview of wikis in Blackboard.

Related Pages


Wiki Privacy

From CUNY Academic Commons

Wiki Basics

Wikis are by their very nature open, public, and democratic. A wiki page grows as contributors collaborate and nurture its content. Users should not be scared off by this aspect of wikis, and should be aware that all versions of a wiki page are automatically saved, and it is quite easy to reverse unwanted changes.

Private Wikis on the Commons…

Still hesitant about the putting up your content on the public wiki?  Need to collaborate on confidential content? The Commons also has BuddyPress Docs, which a wiki-like document handling interface with granular permissions settings. Click here for more information on BuddyPress Docs.

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The Commons Wiki: Realizing its Potential

From CUNY Academic Commons

The following is based on a post by Scott Voth, on Wiki Wrangler.

The Academic Commons Wiki publishes many kinds of writing – individual and group projects, grant proposals, shared lesson plans, research ideas, repositories of useful links, solutions to common problems, ideas on course management…

Our wiki lets people to work together and share knowledge.

There is something empowering when you create a wiki page. You add some headings, and a little information, and see a table of contents automatically created for you. Then you link to a page, and are able to create it automatically. You quickly enter some related content, and then maybe tag your pages, and now you have a sub-category, with an automatically generated index, listed in alphabetical order. Cool…

External links are easy to add, and you can even get a little fancy and include other media – pictures, video, PDFs, powerpoints… Get other people involved, and they can add to what you’ve done, and suddenly something much larger has been created.

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. With their ability to return to prior versions, authorship anxiety is lessened. Don’t like the current version? You can always go back to a previous draft. Wikis are easy to revise, and they motivate people to work together.

Wikis encourage contribution. Whether it is to share research, identify best practices, publish project reports, or aggregate technical tips or lessons learned, the Academic Commons Wiki is a great way to organize and centralize ideas. Give it a shot!

Boone Gorges, on February 25th, 2010 at 2:54 pm

Speaking as a former sometimes-Wikipedia editor, the real magic of a wiki is that you can start something, leave it for a few weeks, and then come back to see it grown and changed into something new and better than what was there before. In a place like Wikipedia this sometimes happens in a matter of hours, as the user base is so big. In a place like the Commons wiki I imagine that the process of collaborative development will be much slower (even now most pages have at most three or four editors) but it also has the potential to be much more meaningful, as our commons bonds and goals as members of the CUNY community are so much more robust than those of random Wikipedia users.

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.

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Educational Blogs

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

Blogs

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson, 2006, Corwin Press. This book provides a comprehensive explanation and is an outstanding pedagogical resource.

Exploring the Use of Blogs as Learning Spaces in the Higher Education Sector Into the Blogoshere  Here are opening lines of this site: “This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.”

Language and the Internet This is an excerpt from a recent book by the linguist David Crystal, who describes the language of blogs as,  “. . . .written language in its most naked form.”

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog This collaboration between MIT and Stanford describes itself as “a place for discussion about teaching and learning, and general issues concerning higher education.”

WordPress a Better LMS The author discusses using a blog as an alternative to Blackboard or other Learning Management Systems.

HOME | Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

Related Pages

Wikis in the Classroom

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

7 Things You Should Know About Wikis This article explains how students–and faculty–can use wikis to collaborate on.

Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools This webtext focuses on the use of wiki as a tool for writing and for teaching writing. (by Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern)

Teaching and learning online with wikis from the conference proceedings of the ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) in 2004. Pretty basic and focused on online teaching, but a good overview (it’s early–2004 is a long, long time ago in internet time).

Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool From the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Very comprehensive, and includes both wikipedia and using your own wikis in class. And also provides a good overview of other research.

50 Ways to use wikis Great suggestions on how to use wikis in the classroom.

Three Wiki Uses The author breaks wiki use down into three general categories: knowlege repositories, collaborative writing and situation awareness.

Using Group Wikis Online Bill Ashton, from York College, posts an in-depth presentation about using group wikis online on one of his blogs on the Commons, Things I say to my BlackBoard students. Also included in Bill’s June, 2012 post are links to his group wiki grading rubrics and a screencast overview of wikis in Blackboard.

Related Pages


Karen’s table

 

From CUNY Academic Commons

Welcome to the Academic Commons Wiki

The Academic Commons Wiki is a collaborative space in which members can create and share resources. Please feel free to edit existing pages or to start new ones. The boxes on the right-hand side of the page provide links that will allow you to edit, discuss, and view the editing history of pages, find our help system, and submit bug reports. And if you’re wondering what a wiki is, you can click here or check out our wikis and blogs page.

Need some ideas on how to take advantage of our wiki? See the The Commons Wiki and its Uses AC Commons Wiki and its Uses.

                                             A Guide to the Academic Commons Wiki Content
This page provides a guide to categorizing the content on the wiki in the CUNY Academic Commons. The lists here are mainly generated dynamically (automatically) and provide multiple alternative navigation pathways. Because the people who visit the CUNY Academic Commons are diverse, no single exploration path is adequate.
      Pedagogies

   [+]  Best Practices

   [+]  Blackboard

   [+]  CUNY Showcases

   [+]  Online Course Design

   [+]  Online Assignments

   [+] Teaching with Digital Media

   [+]  Web 2.0 eTeaching

   [+] 

       Projects

   [+]  Audios & Videos

   [+]  Cuny iTunes U

   [+]  Educational Gaming

   [+]  ePortfolios

   [+]  Podcasting

   [+]  Rhet & Comp

   [+]  Screencasting

   [+] 

       Tools

   [+]  Blogs

   [+]  Google Docs & Apps.

   [+]  Mashups

   [+]  RSS Feeds

   [+] Social Bookmarking

   [+]  Social Networking

   [+]  Wikis

   [+]