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 is not nuclear physics, but it is a far cry from “plug-in” or “widgets”. You have to copy some PHP code, upload it to the server, hand edit the MW settings file (and hope you did not chop a semi colon- a blank page is a sure sign of a typo in an extension).

The next tricky part was getting the right ID for our calendar. It looks like an email address, but at first it seemed like it had to be the primary calendar on an account, and the one I set up was actually a secondary calendar. It is there in the Calendar settings, under details- the text where it declares the calender ID:

Ahhh, but there is more subtlety- in the tags you (hand code) in MediaWii, you have to swap the “@” for its url encoded entity, “%40″, so adding it to my mediawiki page is as intuitive as:

<googlecalendar>
um25dbsm7uuis774tb5ualldmk%40group.calendar.google.com
</googlecalendar>

But wait there is more– the default layout was rather.. pinched, so to make it wider, I had to go into the extension source code, and bump up the height and width for the iframe tags.

But in the end, and now that I know, it is easy… well, sort of. I have an embedded calendar now for two different SL events, one is ours from NMC, and the other is one maintained by Bruce Summerville in Sydney, who hand adds them to a public calendar when people advertise them on the SL Educators listserv.

http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/NMC_Campus_Calender
http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/SLED_Calender

Smell the napalm!

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 see if there was a gap that they could fill. Begain be adding 100 links to 40+ articles, and found a large increase in the visits to the library web site that came from Wikipedia.

We view this as a very low cost way to enhance access to our collections as well as ane effective way to participate in the creation of resources that are used by millions around the world.

Examples include links added to article on the Klondike Gold Rush

Offered some tips for starting out- reviewing external link policies, using watch lists to monitor pages they are editing.

Stats indicated library links from Google had the expected drop off over summer (as students are off during the summer break)… but Wikipedia generated links continued to increase over the summer! In March 2006 links form Wikipedia were the 12th on their incoming links; in October 2006, it was fourth. Also searches from The Free Library, Answers.com, Lycos which mirror content from WikiPedia.

Future — need to maintain links, assess if they are worth it if links were removed, continue adding links, and explore nore “viral marketing” techniques.

School and University projects that use Wikipedia — such as evaluate and verify content on a Wikipedia article using non-Internet resources; reserach and rewrite/write Wikipedia articles, evaluate wikis as a collaborative writing tool.

Summary – (a) It’s interesting to see an embracing effort towwards Wikipedia from a library! (b) This is a great assignment idea that teachers can us! Identify a content area your students may have knowledge, or access to some resources not yet in Wikipedia (meaning not just counting on Google to find them), and then doing an analysis to see if there are places in Wikipedia to contribute. Or something like that.

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.

1. Go to the bookmark I had for MediaWiki Handbook
2. Type in the search box navigation links
3. 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!

4. 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?
5. But no, there is a fork in the docs, one for MediaWiki 1.5 and newer, which I take.
6. But this is no answer, it’s the big old “This Page Has Moved”:
   
7. Finally, many clicks later, I arrive at the correct area!

Basically it is a Special page you have to request off the root URl of your own wiki, MediaWiki:Sidebar, which you can edit to make the left side links your own.

I know MediaWiki is complex software, but the documents done by wiki are a sprawling mess (at least here there are forward links set up).

But perhaps it’s more of a user error, as I started form an old page. I will see what happens when I start using this newer URl for a MediaWiki documents bookmark http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Contents

But the experience highlights what happens when Wikis Get Big. They Get Messy. It goes with the territory. I can deal with it, but the average user….?

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.

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 person that plunked the most wiki code in the edit boxes.

And Leigh goes on to expand his vision of wikis being a channel for bringing in content from other sources and being able to broadcast them out, on all, the magic carpet ride of RSS still is at the core. He points to the features in the WikiEducator site, which is a powerful site fueled on the MediaWiki engine.

So wikis are more than WikiPedia (thankfully), the mass writing well, and more than the open idea stew pot for collaborators. Just as blogs need not be diaries, wikis are not relegated to being just wild scratch pads…

And across the great Pacific Ocean from Leigh, Brian Lamb picks up the wiki stream, citing WikiEducator, as well as some of the groovy extensions for MediaWiki, but the gem was the pointing to SendToWiki, a site/tool/magic wand that offers a bookmarklet that allows you to send web pages to a wiki so that you can remix them” and that wikis is… MediaWiki.

I’d been meaning to try and write up some recent new bits I’ve picked up from using MediaWiki on a few NMC sites (NMC Campus Guide, Horizon Project).

In prep for our NMConnect event last month, one of our colleagues in the Second Life art world, turned us on to a few useful extensions. I had already been using an RSS extenstion that allows us to embed content read in via RSS feeds, and I had made some modifications on it. I have a front page side bar on the NMC Campus Guide that pulls in headlines via RSS from our NMC Campus Observer. You know that tune about “Small Pieces Loosely….”

MediaWiki extensions are code that people write; you stick a php script or a folder of them inside your mediaWiki extensions directory, and add a line to your LocalSettings.php file to activate it. Some are almost drag and drop in simplicity, such as the ones that allow you to easily embed YouTube video or one that does the same with Google Video. These are really easy, in wii editing, you simply include code like:

<googlevideo>6444586097901795775</googlevideo>

to embed the Google Video from the URL from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6444586097901795775

The Flickr Extension took a bit more leg work; you need to get the phpFlickr code running on your web server, which in itself involved setting up a Flickr API key and such, installing some extra PHP libraries.

but if you get through all that, you can embed flickr images for any desired tag with MediaWiki code like:

<flickr limit=5>dog</flickr>

Which will show the 5 most interesting dog pictures. Every wiki needs that. I set those up, but have not done much with them besides doing a test page that has all three extensions mentioned above.

Gotta love extensions, takes your wiki up a notch.

One of the downsides of doing good wikis is the difficulty in creating a method for navigation between say 5 or 6 or 10 wiki pages that are inter-related. I had done a number of these by manually creating sidebars, or top row wiki text, with hand coded links to the other pages, and a bold tag to indicate the current page. Old school. One short cut is that you don’t need to do special code to highlight the current page. If, say you have a wiki page named “Bugs Bunny”, you can create a cut and paste navigation code like:

== Toon Friends ==
* [[Bugs Bunny]]
* [[Elmer Fudd]]
* [[Tweety Bird]]
* [[Porky Pig]]

If I use this same nav code on all four of my pages, MediaWiki automatically turns the link code to just a bold tag, if you are on ne of those pages.

But that still calls for manual edits, and a _____ load of cutting and pasting to modify your menu.

So that is where MediaWiki templates come in. Woah, these are powerful. They are smaller bits of MediaWiki content you can create, and use as include-like statements in any page. So this means, rather than say, creating a hand coded nav box on every one of my Toon Friend pages, I can create one template, and reference it in any other page… with the payoff, that if I edit the Template code, it changes on all pages that use it.

So if I take the same code above, and stick it inside a page at a wiki page on my site called Template:Toon Navigation (you can just append something like “Template:Toon_Navigation” in a URL that normally generates a wiki page, and it gives you the option to edit this new page. Just pop the code in and save.

Now I have my navigation code in one place, and where-ever I want it to appear in a regular page, I use:

{{Toon Navigation}}

The Double curly braces tell MediaWiki to insert the template stuff into the flow of the page. I used it on the NMConnect series of pages to include the header graphic and right floated navigation, plus the footer at the bottom… it makes for Wiki pages that are more consistent, and used well, can provide an easier way to update content that hand editing gobs of pages.

You can get crazier with templating, as it can use variables and grep like expressions to do powerful tasks.

So this is the thing. MediaWiki is insanely powerful, but the guts of it, and doing things that are not in the box, are not really for the fainthearted. I can never find the same set of documentation bits on a repeat visit (unles I bookmark them) — the docs are a sprawling mess, and there is a book waiting to be written to explain it all in one of those bright yellow covered flavors.

I think 90% of the users of MediaWiki stray as far as changing the logo in the top left and 95% of us use the stock Monobook style I feel like I’ve only scraped down maybe 5 or 10% of what is there. It’s cool to see even more unfolding out there, especially as wikis grow more in variety and interesting uses out there.

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 wiki, so it actively demonstrates the tool in action.

On the site, two chapters are free for anyone, and US$19 gets you access to read, download PDF, and help co-edit a last chapter. Each month, another chapter will be released as free.

It’s great content for those interested in learning more about educator beast practices, but to me even more interesting as an experiment in a new publishing mode.

Learn more in Chaoter 1: Four Letter Words: how wiki and edit are making the Internet a better learning tool (available now for free).

This book is intended to help you better understand how a wiki can transform what you do for the better. Through a compilation of case studies you’ll see how different wiki tools have been applied to a variety of situations – from a major research university to a small liberal arts college, from open source to web-hosted and enterprise tools, from a high school technology course to a college freshman writing program. The first of these case studies illustrates how a wiki has been applied to a world-wide educational website to enable a growing community direct access to contribute and edit content. It also tells the story of how I became interested in the wiki.

Go now! http://www.wikiineducation.com/

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 test page. Ugh- it renders all the content as standard HTML, using tags Media wiki ignore. I assume the example site perhaps has some HTML extensions that allows <a href…> tags, but I did not want to go down that route.

So I rolled up my sleeves, and just edited the output to use Mediawiki type codes. It was only about 6 changes, but I have now incorporated it as a side bar on our NMC Campus Guide wiki, using feed content from the NMC Campus Observer.

There are some good options in the code- I want to explore further the ones that provide a keyword filter (assume it could filter the output to include items matching the keywords), and the option to highlight specific keywords in the output.

Another example test page, using the New York Times technology News feed, this an output with item descriptions, and entering my own string for the feed title:

But so far, I like what it does, and is going to be a key loose joining in some new small piece action.

Oh, I posted a copy of my version of this at http://cogdogblog.com/code/rss.php.txt – just remove the “.txt”, and modify the one path variable for your location of magpie (I will later post my change to the Mediawiki site where I found it).

Feed on, inside yer wiki!

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
PBwiki Team

PS–We developed a new overview page of wikis in education:
http://www.pbwiki.com/edu

And we have tons of examples, like:
* Penn State’s English 15 class:
http://epochewiki.pbwiki.com/RhetoricAndComposition
* A Texas teacher’s wiki,
http://teachingtechcomm.pbwiki.com

I provided my own feedback, along with my own love of PBWiki, and asked him also to contact Maricopas’s Alisa Cooper, who I mentioned previously recently for her workshop done here using PBWiki.

But hey, more blog readers/commenters are much better than me, so I encourage you to add some of your own ideas and Ramit can find them in the comments below. What does it take for teachers to take that leap into wikis?

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 resource.

Go, Wiki, Quickly! It’s nice to see the first steps of something that may fly.

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 lock pages, and access to usage statistics. And along the way, I picked up a bag of Web X.0 tools I had never seen or used-

* StickiPad a hosted wiki that offers a spreadsheet like functionality
* Meebo a browser tool that allows you to run chats in AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, all in one interface. Slick. Nothing to do with wikis, but slick.
* SeedWiki which I had heard of but never bothered to look- it has a full featured WYSIWIG editor which frees people from needing the bizarre wikis formatting codes which are never the same from wiki to wiki

And check out the ways Dr. Coop has used Wikis:

* English 101 Book Selection
* ENG101: Freshman Composition Wiki — used for classroom content presentation, student peer review, and posting of student writing; see the “Unit Projects” as well as the ones from fall 2005
* Deer Valley HS Track Team Wiki – ideally the coaches would post info about the events they support– “This is the team wiki for a local high school. The other coaches haven’t caught on to it yet, but the student athletes love it.” (The Dr is also an athlete and coach- she even finds time to run marathons!)

She is one of these faculty us IT folks dream to work with, and I will miss her after I am gone April 7– keep on pushing all the envelopes, Dr. Coop!