12.14.05
Setting up a wiki
I have been trying to set up some collaborative tools for my MBA course for the spring semester. One of the things I have wanted to do is to set up a course wiki and have the students contribute to it. Unlike what I do with most of my tools, where I erase everything at the end of each semester to give students a fresh start the next semester, I am going to keep the wiki building as an ongoing, long-term project. Each group of students will add to and refine that which has been done previously.
The questions were many as I embarked on this trail. The first was to find a package I could install, given the security restraints of our university’s server. I tried several, but all failed due to various restrictions which we had on the server. Finally, I found one that had both a GNU license and tthat worked on our server. The package I ended up installing was pmWiki. It doesn’t use a database like most wikis. Instead, it uses a flat-file system. While this is not optimal for large wikis, mine is small and it seems to work fine for my use, at least in testing.
Anticipated Problems
I anticipate several problems as I involve the students in this:
- The students will have a difficult time posting. Contributing to a wiki is not intuitive, so some training will be required.
-
The students won’t be sure what kinds of things to contribute. I will have to train them here, too, and give them some good examples.
-
The students won’t want to participate. Here I’ll be observing the difference between my undergraduate and graduate students, but I have a feeling that students will enjoy participating, since a wiki is a peer-to-peer configuration, rather than a top-down concept.
I’ll report back here as this project matures. A wiki is just one tool in a large toolbox available to us today. In future posts I’ll report on some of the other tools I use, including podcasting, vodcasting, and student-centered RSS feeds.
