Difference between revisions of "About Mediawiki at Evergreen"

Revision as of 09:47, 2 June 2011

Mediawiki at Evergreen

Mediawiki sites are available for all academic offerings. Evergreen uses the same base install found at Wikipedia but can be customized to meet your needs. Faculty may request a wiki site by contacting their Academic Computing Liaison.

Curricular Uses

• Collaborative Writing
• Create a group knowledge base
• Presentation tool
• Web-based research journal
• 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)

Disadvantages

• Unless structured from the beginning, wikis can quickly become chaotic
• 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.
• Need to learn wiki syntax

Wikis at Evergreen

• Index of all wikis
• 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