01.08.06
Posted in wikis at 8:58 pm by Norm Garrett
I am going to attempt to get my students this semester to use a wiki, so I have spent the past few weeks getting things set up for the semester that begins tomorrow. I have identified the software (pmWiki), installed it, configured it, and tested it. In addition to that, I have had to become versed enough in it to be able to guide my students in its use.
My intent is to have each of my classes (each has their own wiki set up) develop content that I will retain for subsequent semesters. The content will revolve around the topic of the class. The classes I teach are undergraduate courses (Internetworking and Tecommunications Programming with VB.NET) and a graduate MBA course in Management Information Systems. As I experiment with this during the semester, with the different levels of students, I will report back here periodically on my progress. My undergraduates are very tech-savvy Computer Information Systems majors, but my MBA students come from lots of different disciplines and tend not to be very technical. The contrast will give me, hopefully, a good idea of how well a wiki tool will work as a collaborative tool. Stay tuned.
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12.14.05
Posted in Tools, wikis at 7:21 am by Norm Garrett
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.
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