Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side
4/1/2004
A pilot project by the University of British Columbia utilizing the online
environments known as “wikis” began modestly, but an enthusiastic
response across campus has rapidly increased the scope of its use. The radical
simplicity and versatility of wikis has encouraged individuals and groups to
develop novel uses for the technology, producing impressive results with minimal
resources. However, the very qualities that make wikis so successful as a grassroots-oriented
pilot can also create corresponding challenges as the project grow. It will
prompt difficult decisions about suitable use by the institution and users.
The term “wiki” (the Hawaiian word for “quick”) is
applied to many systems with wildly varying features. Any user can edit the
content of the page through a Web browser—authoring software, permissions,
or passwords are typically not required.
UBC's Experience
University of British Columbia’s pilot began on a small scale, with an instance of the UseMod wiki system (http://www.usemod.com) installed to support individual use and experimentation within the university’s Office of Learning Technology. UseMod runs under UNIX or Win32 with either Apache or IIS, and the code is in one Perl file with all configuration variables readily accessible.Wiki adoption at the University of British Columbia has since grown spontaneously.
The quick access to the authoring interface and the simplified mark-up language
invites participation and experimentation by just about any user, and the resulting
spirit of adventure has resulted in a diverse array of applications:
- Jim Sibley of the Faculty of Applied Science Instructional Support at UBC,
links wikis into its WebCT authoring environment so that course design teams
can quickly and collaboratively build reference lists, course outlines, brainstorm
instructional strategies, and complete systematic questionnaires.
- The Career Services unit is using wiki pages to prepare content for a major
site redevelopment presenting job postings and career education. Authoring
can proceed without waiting for the technical framework of the site to be
completed.
- Teresa Dobson, assistant professor of Education at the University of British
Columbia is using the wiki space in both her teaching and research. Her graduate
course on technologies for writing employs the wiki to support collaborative
experiments in composition, and as a prompt for reflection on the nature of
online writing and reading.
Pilot to a Enterprise Application
An enthusiastic response presents its own challenges as the technology becomes more widely adopted. As users apply wikis more commonly in their practice, they increasingly come to depend on them. A power failure on campus rendered many Web servers inaccessible over a weekend. Though data was backed up and there were no lost pages, students who had projects stored exclusively on their wikis experienced considerable anxiety with deadlines looming.Recommended Reading
- Beck Technology Donates DProfiler to Colleges, Universities
Beck Technology recently announced that it will donate its DProfiler software platform to colleges and universities for use in construction-related coursework.
- Microsoft Adds Gen 4 Datacenters for Cloud Computing
Microsoft is initiating the fourth in a series of datacenter upgrades to enable its cloud computing services, according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday. And, like everything else in the software world, being highly modular is a good thing.
- Can You Operate as a Virtual Being?
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
- Columbia Center To Smooth Web Operations with Collaboration Suite
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
- IBM's Pass It Along: Mapping Memes Toward A Learning Organization
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
