About Mediawiki at Evergreen

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Revision as of 10:03, 28 November 2012 by Greenea (Talk | contribs)

64px-Mediawiki logo.png
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

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