We'd published internally before on RSS (Fall 2003) and wikis (Fall 2004) without much of a measurable ripple. But already in a few days:

(1) Our Blackboard admin has seen how Feed2JS and RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange can be used to pipe content from our Blackboard Support materials MLX collection into a Bb site for the staff around our system that use/support Blackboard:

Yeah, this is not exactly new or earth shattering, but they went and did it on their own.

(2) Another group is using a new open wiki (unspecified, sorry) for creating a place for their People Soft Portal team to do some brainstorming.

(3) We convinced a few folks who attended this week's NMC Online oCnference on Visual Literacy to use a wiki to declare which sections they would review and to post some notes. We were able to send up to 10 people from our system to this conference, and at our first suggestion to use a wiki to collaborate, there was silence and an offer from one leader to have everyone "email their notes so he can blog them". I snuck ahead and created the wiki site, and that turned the bulbs on for the group. Maybe-- it appears that only 3 of the 10 actually got their fingers in the wiki. But we'll take any bits of progress we can get.

(4) And emails like this:

Dave _______ has been looking at the MLX section of the mcli site and had incorporated some of it for Blackboard.

He had an idea of possible doing something similar and harnessing the power of RSS for our Peoplesoft SIS Project web site.

Where can I find out more about how this works, what we would need to do to get it going, and some ideas on how to implement this?
 

We might be getting some traction finally in these technologies that to me, have budded passed "emerging".

So if you are struggling in your system to get some adoption, bring in a Canadian!

One need was to have copies of the wiki as backups and to run locally from my laptop (I run all my web apps on my personal unix G4 powerbook). This was useful for example, when we presented at the League For Innovation conference in New York City that wanted $700 bucks for an internet connection in the presentation rooms. Zppppppf to that! I just ran the same wiki on our server from my laptop, and as a bonus, I could work on the wiki on the plane flight over.

The other need is moving a wiki to another server. You can pretty much make a copy of the entire wiki directory, and place it elsewhere. The things to watch out for are:

* Update the config file to reflect the file path to the wiki directory.
* Make sure permissions are writable on the wiki directory. There may also be issues of thepage sub directory does not have writable permissions. Permissions will make and break you in unix.
* The latest lesson is to completely delete the users and temp directories. This is the area I am most fuzzy. Until I did this, I was unable to set preferences correctly from the wiki (perl errors on lock files). Deleting these two directories and what they contained cleaned the problems-- maybe it was only the temp that needed cleansing. A downside might be that the profiles, accounts, might by munged so users might have to reset their names. We don;t have many users besides myself so far so it may be a bigger issue than I imagine. You may need also to delete any *.lk files in the pages directory. Again, I am not sure.

So I barely know how these really work and what these files do, but I muck around until something good happens. But you can move a wiki and keep it too, and that is a good thing.

This is just a quick surf, but I'm headed back later to dive deeper. Don't be put off by the business language -- it is perhaps a big step for wiki-ology from geekdom to wider use..

The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions. We are honored to announce that Ward Cunningham, the inventor and host of the original WikiWikiWeb, will present the opening keynote talk at WikiSym 2005. Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to WikiSym 2005!

I hope someone buys them a style sheet ;-)

A big draw might be the presence of Ward Cunningham, the grandfather of all wikis.

How do you help people make the "Aha" step from that first look of puzzlement when you describe a web site that anyone can edit or destroy?

I think when they begin to understand that the users are in control; that though they may sacrifice some functions such as security and organization, they gain a great deal of speed and autonomy. It really requires doing to become a believer.

I do have one gimmick, where I invite people in the audience to erase or deface all of my materials. Then I restore my stuff with a few clicks of the mouse. That really is the key to the notion of "Soft Security" (which underlies this approach). It needs to be easier to fix damage than it is to inflict it.

The fun thing about this interview was we conducted it all via iChat, as alluded to a few months back.

A bonus for the web version that the print one lacks are a few more wiki sidebar resources (such as Brian's rockin' NMC show, Wired for WikiPhonics). We also have in the online article a full transcript of the iChat session [56k PDF].

The transcript was rather easy to accomplish- the session was saved from iChat as a iChat file, and simply by printing to PDF, it comes out nicely formatted (though it lacks the iChat icons.... I am the Dog and Brian is the Skeleton ;-)

Again, the format of doing an interview by chat was easy to pull off an effective, especially if interviewer and interviewee have the questions arranged a head of time. There of course is some lag as both are trying to be more clear (while typing) then just sloppy chit chat. I would definitely use the approach again.... anyone want to be interviewed for my Spring 2005 article??

Well, maybe I am caving in a bit to the wiki url spammers but as it is the sites we set up are completely useless wikis as they pile up with pages of links to URLs with names so horrific I get a slimy feeling just reading them.

Thanks to the roach spewing crap, it was the 163 nasty URLS at a time from gprs-232-69.scs-900.ru that tossed me over the edge, our wikis are now READ-ONLY, and we have set up editor passwords that will allow the people we wish to participate to edit our sites. Sadly for UseMod, this is applied wiki-wide. I am shopping for some wiki software to implement down the road that will hopefully offer more page level permissions.

I did play with my own UseMod hack that would provide a configurable threshold number of URLs that could be posted in one swoop... it did work fine, but even that was not worth the effort.

Maybe a gated wiki is only a half wiki, but a wiki full of things like "beastiality-horse-sex" is DOA. If anyone wants the pleasure of the 163 nasty URLs... well, I have them in a greasy paper sack under a pile of rotten fruit.

And so far, nary a roach has stepped up to proclaim their identity to me. No big surprise at all.

Among other bits, I've been stirring up the interest in wikis here-- and like my standard fashion, I go about getting folks excited about technology and then I leave ;-) All of my workshops and presentations have been provided in 100% wiki format, and you can find a mirror of this content at:

http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki

where you may notice that this wiki is completely read-only, a steel walled, secret service escorted, roach proof one way wiki (to keep the traffic down on their server here, be nice!!).

There is a new collection I quickly assembled for my last demo today "Riding the Wiki School Bus: How Educators are Getting on Board" a shopping list of where educators are on the wiki wiki bus.

Anyhow, yesterday was my over ambitious attempt to hit an audience with a fire house of technology, what I titled "Rip.Mix.Learn.":

http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki?RipMixLearn

This was for a group of mostly faculty gathered two days for a "Symposium" on "Conversations On Teaching and Learning"- and the graciously tried to keep attention to me throwing about 20 technology ideas at them in 45 minutes. I did ask at the end for some hand raises to my question, "Was this too much technology?" and most were up. That's okay- my whole purpose was to ask them to be aware the things are happening out there at a crazy pace, and to keep that in mind while getting hunkered down in local issues and grappling with Blackboard.

They did get a chuckle on my disclaimer about predicting the future.

Again the "gap" between today's teachers and students is grand, and may even being growing wider. I attempted to demonstrate this between a musical metaphor of comparing teaching as an orchestra conductor to how today's students access music of choice from the Apple iMac ad "The Concert".

As predicted at the end they all gave polite applause... and gave me a bottle of wine. Not bad, eh?

Anyhow, it has been a most fantastic time here. New Zealand is just an amazing place to just see (see my flickr photos) and the people are outstanding, outgoing, and wonderful even if they do not understand how my country operates (I could not add any clarity there).

At 10:00 am I was pretty much up the wiki without a paddle... until I realized that the day before I experimented with loading all the wiki content to a server back in Arizona. Brilliant! I was saved! I did lose some of the additions I made last night, but I was much better off that trying to describe a wiki and content in words only.

Be careful of living and dieing by the wiki ;-)

Please do me a huge favor-- if you are interest in looking at this wiki content, please hit my Maricopa mirror:
http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki

It has all the same content (though I need to make some minor updates about 9 hours from now). That way I can use the best of what bandwidth they have here.

One thing that has gone well has been providing all of my workshop materials and presentations in wiki format. For one thing, the "quick quick" comes in handy for producing them minutes before a session starts. But more than that, I have tried to give participants a good amount of hands on in the wiki activities, and from the feedback I overhear, there will be a level of interest/demand for access to wikis after I leave.

I got a chance to dabble more with UseMod settings, and tweaked some to allow me to use better style sheet and image placement. Actually I got clever and have been able to run the same wiki content from the web server and my Powerbook laptop. Nice...

That is often what feels like my job- instigate interest in new technologies and then leave.

Anyhow, for reasons regular CDB readers are aware of, I have been purposefully quiet about the wikis over in this blog. But the scurrying of little roach feet have made their tracks over here. Oh well, it is worthwhile for the support staff here to have the experience of the dark gooey slimy side of wikis.

I did a small test yesterday, and sftp-ed the entire wiki directory to one of my secret servers at Maricopa, and with some path adjustments in the configuration file, I was able to mount the same content on a different server. I made it read only for roachy reasons. This way I will have a mirror copy so I can steal from my own wiki down the line.

For what its worth, we have taken here on the Kiwi Wiki to lock nearly all of my presentation pages and leave no avenue for mucking things up with unwanted roachy URLs. It's about the best balance I could stomach.

Sooo, workshop materials you will find in (READ-ONLY format- don't wast your time roachies when there are plenty of other open, ample fields).

• WebTools a smorgasboard of examples of web site references, virtual labs, treasure troves, play areas
• Hybrid Courses overview, issues, Maricopa efforts, resources/projects outside of Maricopa.
• Learning Objects: Toys Or the Real Thing which included my obligatory complaining about definitions and meta data. The activity part is where it happened- we gave participants links to some major repositiories and gave them 20 minutes to find and describe objects that could find- they reported out by creating new wiki pages for their responses (saves the wiki collision issues when multiple people try and edit the same entry.)
• Again, an overview of Maricopa and external efforts, but the bulk of the time was spent in creating Maricopa eP content (on a server here that Audree had installed a few weeks ago) in portfolios we pre created for registered participants. We were able to link to s batch of new ePs added just during this session.
• RSS and Learning Objects.. or What is RSS (and Why Should I Care?) a quick pass through RSS and on content from the NMC 2003 Online Conference presentation on Connecting Learning Objects with Trackback, RSS, and Weblogs. They also got a spell of using Feed2JS which is alo running "locally" here on a UNITEC server
• BlogShop weblog workshop included an over-view, and then we gave them access toi 3 test Blogger.com sites-- however 9 of 12 opted to create their own blogs! This was a great session that was very much "cooking"
• A general introduction to Digital Stories including watching via DVD about 5 movies form a collection of perhaps 12 created by participants in our August 2004 Digital Storytelling workshop. I also added a collection of DStory "variants" since often the assumpotion is the Digital Storytelling is done only with video. I think much more broadly.
• I also ran an excellent digital photo workshop. Here participants took digital cameras out on campus with an assignment to acquire 4 varieties of images. They then transferred thewm to the Macs here, used iPhoto to do quick edits and cropping, and then they posted images to a wiki page. Once they were there, I has able to create a slideshow using our jClicker template. Finally, they got the whole enchilada- uploading (and tagging) images to flickr, and then doing a direct blog post from flickr to Blogger.com.
• And today, I did a peudo repeat of a presentation from an online conference last April: Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images from the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference.

Well I am forgetting a lot because I am tired. I know some will say it was foolish to post about what might be a roachie target, but I get tired of halting plans because of them.

And more of these are coming....

Beyond the vast WIkiPedia with legions of rabid followers, most little wikis are doomed. Doomed. Doooooomed. Yours may be next.

The long scrolling title for today's pre-conference Seminar was "Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies" where we initially planned to focus on using RSS, Trackback, etc to connect learning objects (someone done before). It has been under wraps because, well it was infested with typos and half baked ideas, but now we release the presentation in its wiki-form:

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?ObjectsEducause04

We spun it around recently to more of a take on the Rip Mix. Feed concept for collecting information from numerous sources (via RSS?), using social filtering tools or RSS to "mix" them into new forms, and then Feed the, back as new content or re-syndicated content.

It began with some playful fun at the mysterious, mythincal, PeskyObjects where we shared some of our frustrations with the mammoth Learning Object Repository projects (heads were nodding).

Into the mix, we had participants find objects with RSS, load them in shared Bloglines accounts, and blog their results, demo-ed using Feed2JS to convert RSS to usable output in any web page, A quick overview of Trackback and how it (should) work in the MLX. But the more exciting part was introducing them to the tagging phenomena of social bookmarking with del.icio.us
and then the similar approach for tagging photos in flickr (and adding hotspots to images).

It was utterly ambitious, but we had an eager group, and much to our amazement, we covered it all. Check out a few snapshots in a flickr set.

One of our fun elements was that we randomly had assigned them to two different "teams" where each team could post to a different MovableType weblog, a bloglines account, a del.icio.us account, and a flickr account. Being from different parts of the Northern Hemisphere, one group's blog hosted at UBC as the Canadian "Objects, Eh?" team while the other blog, hosted at Maricopa, was the Arizona Western theme of "Howdy Objects". All of the above mentioned tools are incestuously RSS fed back to the blogs.

To make it even more freaky, we "dressed" up in our respective uniforms.

You can peek at the outcomes of what people did via:

Weblogs

• http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/objects/
• http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/objects/

Shared Feeds (Bloglines)

• http://www.bloglines.com/public/objectseh
• http://www.bloglines.com/public/howdyobjects

Shared Bookmarks (del.icio.us)

• http://del.icio.us/objectseh
• http://del.icio.us/howdyobjects
• Tagged for "learningobject" http://del.icio.us/tag/learningobject/

Shared Photos and "Objects" (Flickr)

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/objectseh
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/howdyobjects
• EDUCAUSE04 Flickr Group http://www.flickr.com/groups/educause04/
• Tagged for "educause04" http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/educause04/

If anything, we exposed people to some new tools to consider. There is much more appreciation for the role and potential of RSS for channeling information, but it is still an on the edge technology for many out there, even in the IT basecamps.

Well, it was fun, but draining. Now I can relax for the rest of the conference, or cynically blog from the back of the room.

Wikis are one of those internet phenomena that are confusing, intruiging, powerful, and often misunderstood. Many users and even some programmers of wiki software have missed the point completely, and from what I've observed in scholarly discussions on the subject, most teachers "using wikis in the classroom" are so far off the mark that I am at a loss whether to laugh or cry. When I read these reports, it's like reading about how someone completely and utterly failed to use their shiny new Ferrari to properly tow a horse trailer. What I'm saying is that people are so confused and misinformed about wikis, both practically and philosophically, that they are abusing the term to the point of doing a major disservice to the true wiki community. To address this wretched situation, I have decided to come down from my mountain and make some observations that hopefully a few of the brighter people here will understand.

This is pretty much along my impressions of the commentary on this "new" technology (that is more than 8 years old). There is confusion about wiki vs blog wiki vs discussion board, wiki versus course management systems-- why do people tend to think only in either/or modalities? It is much more reasonable to avoid dichotomies and mix and match your tools and resources.

He/she goes on to cite more or less why WikiPedia is the One and True wiki, and some observant thoughts about the different between this new sort of organic content community and the old, pay for a publisher model of encyclopedic knowledge:

People are slowly starting to realize that an entry in the Wikipedia is a better authority than a traditional encyclopedia or, for that matter, any traditional reference, precisely because it reduces the status of authors. Where authors recede, knowledge comes forward. Wiki is the single most important development in knowledge-production or "making meaning" the world has ever known...

Wiki does not find its authority in the credentials of authors; indeed, the entries quickly become autonomous from individual authors and take on their own existence. They are always developing as new collections of indviduals aim to refine or destroy them; but each edit only pushes upwards. Gradually the entries connect with one another and thus bring together communities of wiki authors. Entries show up in online articles, forums--soon they will start showing up in printed books (but no matter). Those familiar with the free software model will recognize that the same features apply to Wiki--new authors do not compete with Wiki; they merely add to its richness. Eventually, Wiki will be as well-integrated as thought itself.

It's gonna be hard for most to toss the old approach to Truth and Authority, and accept that all is relative in the world out here.

This is all fine for the monstrous scale of an entity that the WikiPedia has grown into-- I'd like to hear more about the role of the little seed wikis, the buds, where people may cut their teeth with the wiki way.

Wikis are strange, strange things, and its gonna take a long while before a large number of folks truly embrace them.

Please do not delete. I send this message only one time, in order to introduce some China website. IF you delete, I will publish every day.

There is only one problem, my Chinese spamming guest... your web sites have zero or even negative relevance to our educational oriented wikis. What do links to suppliers of electronics, fireworks. linens, camping equipment, fishing gear.... have any freaking connection with Learning Objects?

Well, now you have another problem China spammer. Try and figure it out.

What would I do?

Then a flash of brilliance (or I thought, maybe it was the lights flickering down the hall).

Since we were introducing wikis via our Ocotillo Action Groups, an interview with someone that could talk profoundly about wikis would be key. Like Brian Lamb, who just wrote the great article on wikis in EDUCAUSE Review.

My flash was asking Brian if I could conduct an interview via iChat. I could have done an email interview, but this sounded more spontaneous. And fun.

I have to say it worked well. I got about 15 questions answered thoughtfully by Brian in about an hour of time. I was able to save the transcript from the session, and pretty much copy paste it into Word, edit it down, and Voila! a draft, and a happy editor.

What worked well? I think a key factor was writing my questions in advance and emailing them to Brian. He could be somewhat prepared. During the interview, I could cut and paste the questions in, but also skipped some, and created others on the fly.

This would be very easy to set up as a lesson assignment for students. Doing an interview by email is very viable, but there is not the back and forth real time exchange that happens in chat.

I'll be able to share the article and the full chat transcript after we publish in November. It has a memorable catchy, metaphoric title. Yes, I am teasing and with-holding, but I have to respect my editor's wishes ;-)

I'd easily do this again in the future. I am sure I will once again get hit by a looming deadline. You can bet it on it.

They hit the same pages, and in fact are wiki URLs mentioned here, so I am not linking directly to them. The IP addresses vary across the 220..., 221..., 60... range. I have been trying to sort out the correct syntax for the UseMod Banned IP features, which require perl regular expressions. not exactly my forte, but I found some examples with a 15 minute Google section. Found some useful stuff from the KaminskiWiki.

I was also reassured, amused that the UseMod wiki itself was encrusted with the same exact crud ours has been hit with recently, URL for URL.

I know it is a losing war. I know it. I know it is the wiki way, and that in "good" wikis, the community polices itself. Yet, this is a new space, and do you think people are enticed to return if their first view is two pages of noise and gack?

On another front, there is something about the phpBB discussion boards I am using in that there must be some robots (or maybe I forgot again to exclude the Google crawler) that detect new boards out there. We had allowed anyone to request and email confirm their own account, but after seeing 10 new accounts, al with hotmail emails, for users such as "Valium-876" and 'Italian-Tongue-Ring-043' I had to revert the settings for accounts needing admin approval.

Don't people out there have better things to do than dump their crap in good intentioned open sites? What is, pie in the sky, all the effort that went into promulgating spam actually did something productive? constructive? of use or benefit to the world. I of course am dreaming or taking hallucinogens this morning, but I can think of lots of things I'd rather be doing than cleaning out blog comments, wiki pages, discussion boards of content that is irrelevant, unwanted, and frankly, worse than dog-s****.

Stephen has suggested my wish is naive or misplaced for Google to remove their page rank as an incentive (spammers try to insert their URLs all over the place because it improves their rankings on search results), but I beg to understand why. If Google did not reward the viagra promoters with page rank, wouldn't the incentive be at least largely decreased for the spammers to push their URLs? If someone can explain this to me in simple terms, I will toss this belief, but I still think firmly that Google, with all their expertise and now money, ought to do something about this. Please, Google- remove the incentive for spammers. Ban them completely from the index.