CogBlogged Tagged ‘wikis’

Come to San Diego, October 17-18 for the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis: 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.

We’ve just put online our Fall 2004 issue of our office’s publication, the mcli Forum, and am finally glad I can share with you the featured technology interview I did with Brian Lamb, perhaps not so cleverly titled as “Where the Wiki Things Are”. 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 [...]

Another open system bites the dust. 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 [...]

Today is my last day in a little slice of green heaven known as New Zealand where I have been visiting and giving workshops at several institutions in the Auckland area (see the CogDog’s upside down inverted cousin, the CogDog(kiwi)Blog). 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” [...]

I might have been a bit premature to share the wiki links for my New Zealand workshops. Apparently the server here got rather overwhelmed with traffic, because it was pretty much unusuable during my workshops down south at Manukau Institute of Technology. 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 [...]

I’m about halfway through my three week visit to Auckland New Zealand for an ambitious series of workshops at several schools here, and am bouncing between my regular CogDogBlog and its flipped over variant here CogDog(kiwi)Blog as well as two (or more) flickr sites. I may be losing track of where I leave my dribbles of ideas. 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 [...]

Pity the poor Teaching Wiki. Buried in s-p-a-m. Beyond the vast WIkiPedia with legions of rabid followers, most little wikis are doomed. Doomed. Doooooomed. Yours may be next.

Today, Brian Lamb and I pulled of another rollercoaster wild ride presentation, one that more or less emerged and arose from the primordial soup of our minds 2 weeks ago, 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 [...]

Over at Kairosnews, blacklily8 has some strong words about the new found obsession with wikis: 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 [...]

Sigh. It is no wonder no work is going on this morning. Our Asian wikis spammers returned, this time not only spamming our pages, but creating their own… and this time leaving a veiled threat of a message: 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.