Difference between revisions of "About Mediawiki at Evergreen"

Revision as of 10:03, 28 November 2012

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. Some faculty have used wikis at Evergreen as a staging ground for student publishing at Wikipedia.

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