CogBlogged Tagged ‘wikis’

Sometime before the end of December. my colleague Tom Foster at Chandler-Gilbert asked me to co-lead a workshop for Maricopa library staff. Tom has helped me a lot, so of course I said “yes”. Then last week, he reminded me we had a week to prepare for our session just completed. So what does one do in a pinch, to create quickly some online workshop materials? Quick? Ride the bus… wiki wiki that is. This workshop was for library technical staff from all of our colleges. I am still not sure what they do, but apparently there are some divisions among reference and circulation people. They provided the broad, nebulous request, to “do something with new technology”. So we went with a “buffet” theme. Starting from scratch just 2 days ago, I turned to PBWiki to hoist the site. PB is great because of its simplicity, plus you could have [...]

First, of all, the answer is “no”. The question is what Will at Work Learning poses in Are Wiki’s Inherently Flawed?. While it provides a provoacative blog post title, the question is aimed wrong, and not really even answered. The underlying belief about wikis is that “all of us are smarter than a few of us.” This is comforting illusion in theory, but is just plain wrong in practice. The mediocre don’t always understand enough to judge an expert’s pronouncements. Groups of people often tend toward groupthink or mob psychosis. Powerful interests often control the public conversation and thus become the final arbiters of what is fact. Conspiracy theories often have ninety-nine lives. Hmmm, big, strong words, but what data, evidence is this assertion based upon? CogDogBlog’s rule is to be skeptical of any sweeping generalization made about something on the internet, because it is too vast, to deep, to [...]

This afternoon I am doing an hand-on workshop on our Maricopa ePortfolio tool for the participants in our Maricopa Faculty Internship program. We have had some program like this for a few years where a year’s full of experiences, projects, mentoring is supposedly captured in a one page Word document report. I’ve been applying pressure for some time, that we ought to have intern / fellowship programs either blog, eport, or journal somehow along the way, as the old saw goes– the journey being more important and interesting that just the final destination. It’s like a vacation road trip across Australia, and the only memorabilia you save is the brochure from the tour bus. Anyhow, we have created eport accounts for all the interns and are asking them to use it to post their resume, their materials developed as they move through the program, but most importantly, use the blog [...]

Poking around the site, I found what is more or less some evolving documentation of the ITConversation software and recording process (that would said as “pro SESS” by by northern neighbors ;-) as a wiki document- see IT Conversations Wiki for things like AudioProcessing, IT Conversations in Education, File Formats, Encoders, Bit Rates and More, and much more. Cool. Oops, don’t let the spammers know about this.

flickr foto Obligatory WIki Photoavailable on my flickr Having landed at the Honolulu airport, I paid the computer technogeek’s homage to Ward Cunningham by taking the obligatory photo of the "Wiki Wiki" bus. Wow, is Hawaii heavenly on what? And I get the honor of shuttling between airport terminals on the legendary Wiki Wiki busses, crammed full of fellow touristimos, driven by a feisty woman who barked out orders into the microphone. I rode the wiki! Woo hoo!

Will deftly spotted and posted about a site that showed in real-time the update action over at WikiPedia: You can see the line for each edit in Wikipedia as it’s made. In the few moments it’s taken to create this post, over 80 edits have been made about everything from the Pakistani Coast Guard to Keropok (the most visible fried snack in Terengganu) to Mog (a playable character from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI…Huh?) How cool is that? And how cool is it that just in these last 15 minutes, dozens if not hundreds of people have felt compelled to add what they know to this “compendium of all human knowledge.” but do not bother getting your own glance as blog-popularity (blogularity?) killed the site: “Sorry, rcdumper is a prototype tool not intended for widespread public use. being linked from a high traffic website has created too much load, [...]

If anyone is more into sarcasm than myself, they are hanging out at the Uncyclopedia “the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. A total loving mimicry of the WikiPedia, at the Uncyclopedia at least there need be no debates about authoritative resources since it proudly claims to be full of lies. Just look at the decrepit logo! Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament. Unlike Congress or Parliament, however, we do have a sense of humor. Nonetheless, this is one of the only factual pages, before everything turns into a puddle of utter confusion and disarray. Savor it. And for the love of Sophia, we know you like disarray, (and confusion) but stop adding confusion to this non-confusing page which leads to confusion, and possibly disarray. Which we wish to stop. Non-non-confusion, that is. Not disarray. Or is it the [...]

Okay, maybe we’ve gushed a bit already, but something has happened here in our system. I think it is the Canadian aura, but after Brian Lamb’s Dialogue Day with us last week, people are now popping out of the ground like prairie dogs, and seeing a beautiful wheat filled plain of lovely information technologies… 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 [...]

You can have your wiki and move it too. Several times this past year (and well this past week) I have had reason to move an entire UseMod wiki to another server. It is easy and tricky at the same time, and I think I have it all figured out now. 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 [...]

Interested in wikis, but turned off by the geeky interface, the technical set up hurdle, or the fear of spam? You’ve got company. But I just quickly scanned Jotspot, billed as “the application wiki”. From what I can scan, it is a second generation wiki offering a WYSIWIG editing interface (“Nothing new to learn. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use JotSpot”), an ability to post by emailing a wiki page (“Every page is an Inbox. Simply “CC:” a wiki page and the email is automatically attached to that page”), and the integration of web forms and other sorts of interactions that suggest it can be used for not just managing content, but creating some web applications (“Jot Spot enables you to build applications, not just pages)”. This is just a quick surf, but I’m headed back later to dive deeper. Don’t be put off by the business [...]