CogBlogged Tagged ‘wikis’

Like Duvall’s Kilgore, who said “there’s nothing like napalm in the morning”, for a web geek, there’s nothing like a bit of curious fiddling with code to make something work. Today’s feat was finagling a MediaWiki extension to display a Google Calendar in our sites. I’ve been using GCal for a year to manage our Second Life events, and Google provides the cut and past code to put in other sides, like our WordPress blog – but MediaWiki is not going to be happy with some <iframe> code, so on some searching I found reference to one on the CouchSurfing Wiki – yet was discouraged that their demo was busted: Going back to the Google search well, I came on the listing of same code in the MediaWiki collection and it suggested that the calendar ID entered in the tags had changed. So there was hope. Setting up MediaWiki extensions [...]

Trying my hand at conference blogging, here at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Phoenix (Hey, my flight here was a 20 minute drive from home). Can I blog faster tan Bryan Alexander? Heck no. This first session of the breakouts is from Ann Lally head of digital Initiatives at University of Washington, and Carolyn Dunford, a former students now at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their project began with some 2005 data from OCLC that reported ony 2% of information searches began at the web sites of libraries (!), while 89% started at search engines. Recognizing the high number of Google results that linked to WikiPedia, they developed an idea to insert links into WikiPedia articles to content or resources that UW has knowledge of or has in their digital collections. Beagin with a content analysis of the strengths of the UW holdings, and then review WikiPedia articles to [...]

MediaWiki – love the app, hate the documentation, a term used loosely. Here is a normal set of steps it took to find the answer. What I was looking for was that special MediaWiki URl you need to use to edit the sidebar links of your site. Go to the bookmark I had for MediaWiki Handbook Type in the search box navigation links I get some results but there’s a big red border box warning at the top: Important note: the instructions on this page may be out of date, incorrect, or unnecessary; for most requirements, the FAQ contains the necessary instructions. This page, however, explains some tasks not covered in the FAQ! Follow the link above for FAQ which looks like I am close, a heading of How do I change the contents of the navigation toolbar? But no, there is a fork in the docs, one for MediaWiki [...]

That was wild. After composing the last post on wiki stuff, I decided to try ou Send2Wiki, where I managed to post my blog entry in Italian!. Amazing! But ick, a flickr page… does not send very well.

Leigh Blackall has some great rumblings on his Vision for Wikieducator, starting with the rant: The problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they’re doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media upload somewhere else. I really hate it when I upload an image to my preferred image host (Flickr) then have to re-upload it if I want to use it in a wiki. And what about this blog post? As I write I’m thinking about how I might put it on the wikieducator discussion pages I’m involved in… I think I’ll just add a link there and point to this post. Wikis are generally messy, chaotic, and unless you have a Wiki General overseeing it, the sites end up being useful to more or less they [...]

It was pretty much another curious link click of serendipity last May that led me to Stewart Mader’s Wiki/Blog Using Wiki in Education. I gotta like a domain he chose that is “wiki” spelled backwards http://www.ikiw.org/. Today Stewart is unveiling his new book/web site project Using Wiki in Education, headlined there as “A Wiki-Based Book”. I got a sneak peek a few days ago, and am rather excited to see this work go out. It includes 10 in depth case studies of educators who are using wikis in the classroom: It contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they’re using the wiki to transform courses and engage today’s students in a range of environments including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab. This is the first book to focus specifically on the wiki in education and be developed and published using a [...]

I’m just getting my feet wet with customizing MediaWiki for several NMC projects- sure it is easy to set up and install out of the box, dump the flower logo for your own, but there is sure a lot of stuff under the hood. There are a lot of flexible editing codes if you can dive into them. While Tim notes some new WikiPedia RSS feeds, and there are RSS out form Mediawiki powered sites to update on changes, I found nothing to render RSS content inside Mediawiki, which I have seen on some other wiki sites. So it was off to scrounge, and I found an extension hot off the press called GISWiki/RSS– te nice thing for me is that it is based on the good old MagpieRSS parser, something I have played with quite a bit. So I dropped the script into my Mediawiki extensions folder, created a [...]

Triggered by yesterday’s post on how one of our Spanish teachers started using PBWiki, I got a nice email from Ramit, one of the PBWiki co-founders, seeking ideas on how to “spread” the peanut butter / wiki concept to other teachers: I also noticed you’re involved in instructional technology, so I wanted to ask your advice. We’ve been making PBwiki better and better for educators to use, and we’re really interested in spreading the word in the educational community. It seems like educators talk to each other pretty often, and I’m wondering how we might reach them to encourage them to use wikis. Do you have any ideas? Are there specific people or places we should be talking to? I would appreciate your advice. Wikis are a fantastic way for educators and teachers to collaborate in the classroom and we’re eager to help teachers do it using PBwiki. Thanks, -Ramit [...]

Two days ago, a colleague at one of our colleges asked me what wiki software our district provides. I responded, “none” (In Maricopa, such services are hosted at each college), but I took the opportunity to suggest that he try one of the free, externally hosted ones to experiment and flesh out some content or ideas. Like PBWiki. It seems to make sense to use the freebies before deciding on an Enterprise Institutional Official Wiki. So how cool it is less than a day later than James shares with not only me, but his colleagues, his Glendale Community College’s Wiki for Spanish students, where it looks like he is providing web resources that correspond to the chapters in his textbook. He says that ChapterTres has the most so far. I am not sure of his plans, but I can envision having his other Spanish faculty, even students, help co-author this [...]

I had fun this afternoon helping in a wiki workshop at South Mountain Community College. “Dr Coop” is Alisa Cooper, a gem of an English teacher who pretty much tries and finds almost every new technology- in a thoughtful and effective manner. She got turned onto PBWiki last year and has been using it extensively with her first year composition students- but she dabbles also in 2 other hosted wiki places, several blogs, Writely, YouTube, and like 10 more I am forgetting. Today she led a “What Can You Do With a Wiki?” Workshop: which, of course, was a workshop on wikkis, that used a wiki for the workshop. Get it? She does: http://drcoop.pbwiki.com/ it’s been a few weeks since I’d been in PBWiki, and they keep adding cool new features. She paid the fee for the upgrade version, which gives you discussion areas on all pages, the ability to [...]