Difference between revisions of "About Mediawiki at Evergreen"

Latest revision as of 11:37, 15 November 2016

Wikis are most often used when faculty want their students to create an online, collaborative knowledge-base. Evergreen uses the same base install of Mediawiki found at Wikipedia.org but can be customized to meet your needs.

Mediawiki at Evergreen

Mediawiki sites are available for academic offerings and staff workgroups. Wikis may be requested by contacting Academic Computing.

Curricular Uses

• Collaborative Writing
• Create a group knowledge base
• Peer reviewed local wiki-space prior to publishing at Wikipedia
  
• Research Coordination and Collaboration
• Conference and Colloquia Web Site / Coordination
• Allows students to create their own areas of a group site

Advantages

• Quick - content can be edited from any internet connected computer
• Flexible - because content does not reside in directories or files (content is stored in a database) the way we approach communicating or organizing information becomes untethered by perceived information containers.
• Focus is on content versus presentation
• Students can post their own work and get interactive feedback
• Large community of users (Wikipedia) sharing tips on wiki usage and best practices
• Handles most multimedia files types
• Leaves a record of who did what (wiki history)
• Wikis can be configured to have various degrees of privacy
  

Disadvantages

• Unless structured from the beginning, wikis can quickly become chaotic
• Unless categories are used, students need to create their own table of contents to show links to their work
• In order to respond to peers' essays students would need to use the discussion tab which is not a threaded discussion but a another wiki page.
  

Wikis at Evergreen

• Index of all wikis
• Invertebrate Zoology and Entomology - Invertebrate Zoology and Entomology Species Accounts. This wiki site used the Wikipedia taxobox templates (a table setting out the Biological classification (taxonomy) for a group of living things) to create species accounts. Each student was responsible for completing a thorough species account; students seeking upper division science credit were required to place their information in Wikipedia.
  
• Museums Program - The Museums program used a wiki for students to collect and document their research.

Wiki Resources

• Wiki Login Help
• Quick Guide to Wiki Syntax
• Mediawiki documentation Evergreen's own wiki documentation
• Wikipedia
• MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
• 7 things you should know about wikis - from Educause