wikis

Cool posts from InsideHigherEd

jdupuis — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:16:42 +0000

Cool posts from InsideHigherEd

Usually every day brings one or two interesting things at InsideHigherEd, but today is a bonanza.

The Ed Tech Sonic Boom
Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes of instructional delivery. To be a great teacher it is no longer a prerequisite to be a dynamic and gifted lecturer. Rather, faculty can partner with learning designers, librarians, and teaching specialists to create dynamic, student-centered courses that allow students interact and create with the curriculum in ways that were impossible before the advent of technology enabled and supported classes.

However, these improvements in course quality made possible by the pairing of learning design methods and technology have brought with them a new set of challenges....
Let's shift some paradigms is the first post from the new blog Student Affairs and Technology which shows a lot of potential.

A couple of years ago I was a participant for a conference panel on student affairs and technology. The evaluations were less than positive. Almost all of the comments shared a common theme: "be less technical and explain the basics." Fortunately, there was one comment that has stuck with me and that I use as a call to action: "Helping me to boldly go where I've never been before." It gives me hope as a student affairs techie that we as a profession have not lost our willingness to learn, to explore, and to stay positive about new technologies. Let's push the envelope. Let's shift our professional paradigms. Let's make technology (and learning about new technologies) a part of our daily practice in student affairs.
Whither the Wikis?

Of all the Web 2.0 tools that have become de rigueur on college campuses, wikis fundamentally embody the Internet's original promise of pooling the world's knowledge -- a promise that resonates loudly in academe.

And yet higher education's relationship with wikis -- Web sites that allow users to collectively create and edit content -- has been somewhat hot-and-cold. Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself online encyclopedia, vexed academics early on because of its wild-west content policies and the perception that students were using it as a shortcut to avoid the tedium of combing through more reliable sources. This frustration has been compounded by the fact that attempts to create scholarly equivalents have not been nearly as successful.
Google and the Digital Humanities

For humanities scholars, having all the world's writings available in a digital format opens up an entirely new realm of quantitative research to supplement the qualitative research that, because of limitations inherent to the print medium, has historically been their sole dominion, say Google officials.

"Traditionally, the conventional model of humanities research is that a professor has his graduate students do deep readings on a relatively small number of texts," says Orwant. "Now, for the first time, we have so many books online and so many useful data mining techniques that it becomes possible, instead of reading 10 books deeply, to read 10,000 books shallowly."
'Elegance in Science'

Q: How do you define "elegance" in the context of your book?

A: The dictionary definitions of elegant -- graceful, tasteful, of refined luxury -- are useless here, because scientists tend to use the word in peculiar ways. Rather than starting with a formal definition, then, I have remembered Wittgenstein's advice -- that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" -- and I spend the first chapter of the book discussing mathematical or scientific proofs, or theories or experiments, that are generally regarded as elegant, sometimes contrasting them with those that are not. I begin with mathematical examples since it is mathematicians that get most enthusiastic about elegance, and there are some very pretty examples that are easily accessible to non-mathematicians. I then proceed to the physical and biological sciences, ending the chapter with a description of the experiment, published by William Harvey in 1628, proving -- what was then not known -- that the blood in our bodies circulates; an experiment that required only a bandage and that could have been done at any time in the past.

jdupuis Wed, 07/14/2010 - 04:16

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educational technology

Google

wikis

Wikis with students: what I've learned about managing files and folders

sporte — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:00:18 +0000

Wikis with students: what I've learned about managing files and folders

It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage.

My classroom wiki site is no exception.

Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've found that I should have set a few things up a bit differently.

Technorati Tags: teaching, teaching technology, wikis, wiki, science education"

The biggest challenge has been making sure that the right people can do the right things - or who gets to see what and upload what where.

Not knowing what methods would turn out to be useful, I originally set up my class wiki with a folder called "students," used templates to make copies of worksheets for each student, then made each student a writer for their worksheet.

But, I found that it was challenging for students to upload files. Either I missed assigning them the proper permissions or they weren't able to find their files after uploading.

It also turned out that giving each individual student permission to work on a file turned out to be a royal pain and too much work.

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight (always 20:20!), here's what I did vs. what I should have done:

What I did

My original tactic of making a new file for every student and every assignment, meant that I had to assign permissions for this many files:

(number of students) x (number of files) = total number

(8 students) x (5 files) = 40 files.

And, the students didn't have permission to upload new files to the student folder. With this method, the number of files to tend goes up with every assignment.

What I should have done

If I had set up a folder for every student, I could have set the correct permissions by folder. Then, all the files in that folder would have the same permissions as the folder. This would have meant that I'd have to assign permissions to:

(number of students) = total number

(8 students) = 8 folders.

This strategy would have better, too, because each student would have had permission to upload files to their folder. And, if I were to add more assignments, I wouldn't have to make sure that I set the correct permissions for every assignment, I would just put the assignments in each folder and they would already have the right permissions.

Sigh.

I suppose it would have been good to do the math before doing the experiment, but heh, if I did that, what would I write about?

sporte Tue, 11/25/2008 - 03:00

Tags

Science Education

teaching

technologies for teaching

giving each student permission to work on a file turned out to be a royal pain

Yeah, point-and-click would be quite tedious. Writing a script to set permissions is scalable, though. And delightfully nerdy.

I don't the wiki system that I using would allow for scripting, but it's a fun idea.

since your wiki is web based, it probably can be scripted. Whether or not its worth the effort is a fair question. Mediawiki is surprisingly easy to script.

Cariaso: I'm pretty sure that pbwiki can be scripted, but since it's a commercial wiki system, I don't think I can script it.

I also don't see any reason to do script anything now that I know how things should be set up.

Wikis and web browsers

sporte — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:42:41 +0000

Wikis and web browsers

In our last episode, I wrote about embedding Google forms in my classroom wiki pages.

Recently, we've been working on a project where students enter results into a Google Docs spreadsheet, via our classroom wiki. All the students were able to enter their results.

Except for one.

When other students went to the spreadsheet page, they saw this:

When this student went to the same page, he saw this:

We tried all kinds of things to see if we could remedy this situation. I checked and rechecked permissions, both in my Google account and in the wiki. We closed and reopened pages, we refreshed, reloaded, quit and reopened. Nothing worked. I even logged in using his name and password on my computer. That worked but it wasn't a solution.

Finally, I had an idea.

"What web browser are you using?"

Everyone else in the room was using Firefox. This student was using Internet Explorer.

He downloaded and installed Firefox and everything was fine. I don't know what was going wrong with Internet Explorer, but I'm glad I saw this in a classroom and not in an on-line class. These problems are really, really, really hard to troubleshoot when you're teaching on-line.

I've gotten accustomed to variations in the ways that web browsers and different operating systems handle pdfs, save files, and download information, but I wouldn't have predicted this result with wikis and Google Docs. Perhaps this is just what happens when you mashup your technologies a little too much.

sporte Tue, 11/18/2008 - 05:42

Tags

teaching

technologies for teaching

wikis

teaching with technology

Must resist entering troubleshooting mode...

Must resist!!!!

Aaaargggghh!!!!!

Were cookies disabled in IE?

(Damn)

Were cookies disabled in IE?

I don't know.

Now, very carefully, put the mouse down and step away from your computer.

It's a Windows machine. Ask them to restart the computer which gives you several minutes in which to escape! ;)

This and all Windows problems are easily solved by typing "format c:" and installing a real operating system.

Teaching with wikis: navigation, student notes, and integrating Google forms

sporte — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:45 +0000

Teaching with wikis: navigation, student notes, and integrating Google forms

This quarter, I'm using a wiki with my bioinformatics class and posting sometimes about the things that I learn.

Two things I've been experimenting with are:

Setting up pages for individual students so they can take notes while they're working.
Embedding a Google form into one of my wiki pages for student assessment.

Here's a diagram showing some of the pages in my bioinformatics class wiki site.

Syllabus: I suppose this reflects on my own lack of organization, but I use the syllabus as a dynamic document, making changes and adding information throughout the course. There are links to activities, assignments, and other materials. I used to try and use Blackboard for this, but pbwiki is so much easier to use.
I learned that students got confused sometimes, when clicking syllabus links, because some of the links go to pdf documents. Depending on the web browser, clicking a pdf might open the document, or the document might get downloaded to your desktop, either one is okay with me, but for the students this can be a bit mysterious because there isn't any kind of affordance or indication that the file got downloaded. So, they keep clicking the link expecting something to happen.

Now, I'm trying addressing this by putting a ".pdf" after links to pdf documents. That way, they should know that the link goes to a document and not a web page.
Activities: Bioinformatics is a hands-on course when I teach it, with lots of activities. I have links to pages with instructions for doing the labs.
Individual student note pages: During the years that I've taught bioinformatics classes, I've learned that students rarely bring paper along when they're working with a computer. At first this came as a surprise, now I'm come to expect that behavior.
The problem is that sometimes I want students to take notes. The wiki gives me a way to do this. I set up a page with questions and tables that I want students to answer and complete while they're working.

After making the page, I tagged it as a "template." Then I used that template to make a page for each student. Then, for each student I added their own unique part of the assignment. In this assignment, each student works with a different DNA structure and students only have access to their unique wiki note page.

I found it was essential that I make myself a student account, too, so I could tell for certain which pages students could see and which pages they couldn't see.

I should mention that all of these pages can be downloaded from the wiki site, in any location, as pdf documents, so students can capture a written record of their work, on their own computers.
Assessment questions: Working on the internet and using diverse sites does present a bit of difficulty for people when they confront diverse user interfaces or get lost when going from place to place. To get around this problem and improve usability, I decided to test putting one of my Google assessment forms into my wiki site.
I set up my assessment questions in a Google form. Then, I copied the embed code from the Google site, and using the HTML plug-in from Pbwiki, I pasted the code in a page.

That placed my questions into a wiki page. Students completed the questions and clicked the submit button. This sent the answers to my Google account, so I could log in, get my spread sheet and I see all their answers at once along with a bit of data analysis from Google.

For some of my questions, I expected to see different answers from each student, so the Google analysis didn't always make sense, but for other questions it was pretty handy.

This method worked okay except for one thing. If students entered information in the form and navigated away from the page, the information was lost. A few web-savvy students realized that they could work around this challenge by opening the form in a new tab, or new window, but this wasn't an obvious solution to everyone (or me).

Next time, I'll use that example and make my wiki links so that those assessment pages open in a new tab or window when the links are clicked. I think that will make the process of completing the forms friendlier for all of the students.

If you want to try a free wiki, you can test these out at different places. I'm using pbwiki, but there are some other sites, too.

sporte Tue, 11/04/2008 - 10:00

Tags

teaching with technology

Science Education

That sounds really cool!
I just graduated with my B.S., and I wish that some of my classes had been like that. I did have a Molecular Biology laboratory course that allowed students to group their own files as they wished to on an online directory for which they controlled the permissions. It made group work MUCH easier (the final project for this class was to write a grant application on a topic of our choosing; I think that the team I worked with uploaded about ~5Gb of files to our directory).

Other questions:
I am currently working in Microbiology/Immunology as a Technician, and wish to move into Computational Biology/Bioinformatics for graduate school. If you are able to answer these questions for me, could you please answer in email at quatsch_AT_med.umich.edu?
1) Which schools do really well for computational biology for graduate studies? All I've been able to find so far are clusters of professors doing interesting things, but no real departmental-level renown yet.
2) Do you use Perl? I'm trying to learn it using Strawberry Perl on a Vista system and I understand how to write a program, but I'm a bit lost when it comes to making the Perl shell run a script. I've tried "$chmod a+x 'filename'" but this and variations upon it don't seem to do anything. Any ideas?

This is fabulous!

I may take some cues from your techniques. I am a biosciences/bioinformatics librarian at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I'm in the process of getting a Master's degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. I teach single-session classes in bioinformatic tools and databases, but I am always looking for new ways to teach electronically. You've done a really nice job of parsing your content into manageable packages and logical sections.

Your insights on Blackboard, other Wikis and Google assessment forms are really appreciated and provide some inspiration. Thanks again for sharing your ideas. I really do enjoy following your blog.

Thanks Pamela!

Toaster: Let's see.

I use Perl on a Mac (i.e. UNIX) with a bash shell (and rarely even then) so there are probably differences with using it on VISTA. You should probably check the Perl FAQ for VISTA to see how that works.

As far as graduate programs, I don't know the answer but I'm willing to query readers. We'll see what they have to say.

For organizing my notes, I use a personal wiki called Luminotes. I can see several notes on different subjects all at once, and unlike many wikis, I don't have to click "edit" and then "save" every time I want to update something.

I run EcoliWiki, which is part of the NIH-funded EcoliHub project. We're working on having instructors use EcoliWiki for courses where students will participate in the ongoing annotation of E. coli K-12, its phages, plasmids, and mobile genetic elements. And we welcome users who want to come up with other uses for EcoliWiki and GONUTS, our other wiki project for the Gene Ontology, for teaching.

I can't tell if you're using MediaWiki or a different platform (looks like a different one, but perhaps its a custom skin?). If you are, we also have a bunch of MediaWiki extensions we've built that we hope will be useful for teaching. For example, we have an extension that lets instructors follow where and when their students have been editing pages. We've modified the Cite extension to make it easy to add references as PubMed IDs, and we've build a forms-based generic table editor. All of these are open source. We recently added the ability to embed a CoverItLive chat session in wiki pages, with the idea of supporting journal clubs and annotation jamborees in cyberspace.

We're not the only ones, of course. There is a proliferation of wikis for science. We're trying to link to as many of them as we can.

Hi Jim,

We use MediaWiki where I work, but I don't like it much because it's not very user-friendly. I used pbwiki in my examples. Pbwiki is a bit buggy, but it's really, really, easy to use.

Hi Pamela,

Thanks for taking the time to post this information. I immediately began experimenting with the use of assessments in Pbwiki for my students based on your example.

I have one question for you,however, how can I associate student names with responses that are collected in the Google Spreadsheet? I would like all of the students to fill out the assessment from a single wiki page - but still be able to discriminate among them.

Sean: I'm not Pamela, but that's okay.

I use a text field in the Google form and ask students to enter their names when they do the assessment. It's true that I can't verify whether a student lies about their name or not, but I do get the time they completed the form from Google and since I gave them their log in info, I can look at the wiki log in records to see if the right student was logged in at the right time.

Hi Sandra,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my question. I'm sorry I didn't post your correct name with my inquiry:-)

What lessons can we learn from teaching with a wiki?

sporte — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:28:09 +0000

What lessons can we learn from teaching with a wiki?

Experimenting with on-line worksheets

I know some people who always teach their classes the same way, semester after semester, year after year.. Not me. I always want to experiment and try new things.

This fall, I'm experimenting with using a wiki in the classroom, in addition to my blog. This wont be my first wiki experience. We've long used wikis where I work, and I've used them to collaborate with people in different locations, but this is the first time that I'll try one in a teaching situation.

The wikis in my past
My earlier experiences with wikis had convinced me that they would be too much trouble to use with a class. At work, we used to use something called Kwiki, and now we use Mediawiki. Both were okay as far as wikis go; groups of people could post text, edit pages, make links, and upload files. But neither of these systems are very user friendly. A new user must learn a strange language and lots of normal text things-like spaces between words-are forbidden. You can't even use semi-familiar languages like html, no, that would be too easy. So, while I've used our work wikis, I've never liked them much. I never thought that they would be useful for anyone other than programmers.

Pbwiki has changed all that. At least it has so far. It's way easier to use than Mediawiki or Kwiki, and I think some of the things that I've normally done with Blackboard are going to be much easier to do with my Pbwiki site.

The first thing I like is the way Pbwiki handles text. I can type normally and quickly create new pages, and organize pages in folders. I can also link pages to each other quite easily.

I also like the ability to use custom security.

Show them what you want and hide the rest
One of the things that I want to do with my class is to give them the ability to record information in on-line worksheets. But, I want each student to have their own worksheet and not have access to worksheets from other students.

First, I set up the worksheet page the way I wanted it. Then, I added the word "template" to the tag section at the bottom of the page. Now, I made an individual page for each student by adding new wiki pages, and choosing the "worksheet" template.

Now, I wanted to set user security so that individual students would see only their worksheet. I had Pbwiki create a certain number of student accounts with log-in names and passwords for me.

I chose "page level security" for the worksheets. Then I went through and for each page, added a student for that page.

I should point out that I used one of the student accounts and pages myself so that I could check it. I used two different web browsers (Firefox and Safari) and logged in to my wiki account as myself- the administrator- in one account, and as a student with the other, this would let me see what a student could see and change the access levels appropriately.

Now, each student will be able to save their answers in their worksheet and I'll be able to log in and see what they did.

I'll write again and report how this works. I'm also interesting in knowing if any of you have tried this sort of things.

Dear readers, what experiences have you had in teaching with wikis?

sporte Sun, 10/26/2008 - 09:28

Tags

I've been using PBWiki for about a year---but mainly as a tool for professional development (the school district I taught in blocked all wikis just in case someone logged in and chose to wrote something inappropriate). They have been great tools for me to set up resources ahead of time---and then for adult learners to be able to share their expertise with one another during and after the workshops. I'm definitely sold on them.

Argh. Can't believe I published with "chose to wrote"...and then had to wait to come back. Shame on me.

I have been using wikis for four years now. I used PBwiki in the past, but am trying out GoogleSites (through GoogleApps) this year.

The wiki is set up for the small-group collaborative projects that the microbiology students do in my laboratory course. The groups must create a group page that they use to post their hypothesis, document their progress, list the supplies that they need, anything else pertinent to the project.

I use it to post announcements, links to protocols, journal articles, anything else that might be pertinent.

The group pages are available for all the students in the class to see; this encourages all students to keep their pages current and on topic.

The wiki is superior to CourseWeb in that CourseWeb is not friendly for student posting, collaborating and editing.

You may want to look into the CourseWeb assignment tool that lets you upload worksheets (e.g. from Excel) which the students (individually) can download, work on, save to their own content collection (within CourseWeb), upload and submit to you when finished.

We did a wiki last year in one of my anthropology classes. As a student, I really enjoyed it, though it was a little frustrating when the other people in my group would wait until the last minute to edit anything. Here's the link:
http://foragers.wikidot.com

My students in a seminar on the history of the controversies surrounding the theory of biological evolution are creating a wiki of relevant student (and professor!) authored articles which we will make world-accessible as a resource when it's done and edited sometime next semester. The prospect that it will be world-accessible with student authors' names attached has concentrated their attention admirably. :)

Zinjanthropus: Wow! the foragers site is impressive!

RBH: can you post your link here when the controversy site is finished? I'd be interested in seeing it, both from the technology side and from the content.

Melanie: I'll look into Google Apps - and CourseWeb.

SG- I don't know why Washington schools are so opposed to letting students use the internet. Sigh.

At Atlassian we've notice that a lot of graduate students using our hosted Confluence wiki for writing their theses and dissertations. The versioning features are really important to them. Plus a wiki just makes it easy to share your work with an academic adviser.

Sandra,

Delighted to read about how you're using PBwiki in the classroom. We work hard to make the product as easy to use as possible. Feel free to drop me a line with any feedback or suggestions.

In the year 2008 it's never too early to teach collaboration skills. Thankfully, pbwiki is so easy to use that the middle school kids in my CIT summer program loved using it. If it wasn't easy, I couldn't use it. I run about 25 pbwiki wikis for everything from swim team to soccer to girl scouts.

Sandar asked

RBH: can you post your link here when the controversy site is finished? I'd be interested in seeing it, both from the technology side and from the content.

Sure. That's the plan. The technology side is plain vanilla Mediawiki, since that's what the IT people at my college support. The novel contribution is (we hope) on the content side, the coverage of the last two centuries of the controversies.

We're talking not just about the science, but about religious and and socio-cultural interactions as well. For example, the the growing salience of higher Biblical criticism in the late 19th century was a direct contributor to the rise of fundamentalism, and the early 20th century fundamentalist apologists adopted then-current scientific critiques of evolutionary theory as part of their defense against the liberal apologetics of the higher criticism. That in turn (along with the growing incidence of secondary school education using biology texts teaching evolution: "Hey ma! Teacher says you're a monkey!") led to the widespread support for legislative actions like the Butler Act in Tennessee that was the focus of the Scopes trial. One can then trace those early pre-modern synthesis 'scientific' arguments used by fundamentalists in the 1910s and 1920s right on up into modern creationism.

Sorting through the various strands is fun, and we hope to get the core of them into the wiki. It'll be second semester before it's edited for wide-spread consumption.

Thanks RBH!

Your class wiki sounds really interesting.

One thing struck me in your reply, was your statement that MediaWiki is the only wiki your IT dept. supports. Where I work, we have the same problem.

But it doesn't matter. With Pbwiki, it doesn't matter what your IT dept. likes or doesn't like, Pbwiki doesn't require any IT support.

It frees instructors from IT tyranny.

What the heck is a "wiki"?

Have you used Wikipedia? That's a really good example.

A wiki is a kind of web service where multiple people can log in and edit the same page.

The software tracks who makes which edits and what they do. In some ways, wikis are like blogs.

I think the best way to see how wikis work is to watch this YouTube video from CommonCraft.