Apr 22 2007
Tikiwiki rather than NING….and even PLIGG
The names of all these applications is laughable to say the least, but also gives such a ‘technodrooler’ as myself that wonderful feeling that I should never feel – of confusing others. BUT I shall stop now, but just recently as well as my social networking within MFL teaching exploits I have begun my first real attempt at using a Wiki within my teaching.
I decided on using the open source TikiWiki having first seen it used by Dennis Daniels – who really uses it as a full blown CMS and resource repository. However after initially looking at MediaWiki, it became apparent that this was going to be a little difficult to install and upload. What finally made me swoop to choose TikiWiki was the fact that their is a downloadable theme that looks exactly like MediaWiki and the ubiquitous Wikipedia’s theme.
The students did not particularly take kindly to Jimmy Wales’s TED talk, which maybe was a little in-depth but when some of the ideas he was demonstrating were then shown on Wikipedia itself the students suddenly got it! I was amazed to find how few knew how Wikipedia worked and most had never even looked at the history function. So when I showed them the EABIS school page and then the history behind it, along with my ‘pretend vandalism’ – the students began to understand how clever but also how amazing that only volunteers could make an encyclopedia that moderated itself.
How this will translate to a closed community of the class and producing a wiki aimed at understanding loosely the GCSE section of their course entitled ‘ICT in Society’ remains to be seen. I will be giving them specific roles not only in different research areas but also based on the Wiki Patterns idea that different contributors and editors to a Wiki fulfill different roles under titles like Gnome, Troll and Champion. The obvious leader in the school Wiki pack has been the Flat Classroom Wiki by students at the International School of Dhaka. Recently they have also begun a new project based on the Horizon yearly project predicting what will be happening within Education and Technology in the next 1 to 5 years. This is a fabulous and thoughtful read in itself. So the new wiki should be very interesting. I will hopefully report back to you both about my experiences and what I can see as the Horizon projects experiences. Most importantly what learning is coming from using such a technology.
On top of this I have rediscovered another tool that I will not play with until maybe my new school. Pligg (demo) is basically an open source version of Digg, and so as such rather than use a site like delicious to publish and collaborate with your bookmarks you could have such a site working for a school establishment with students and teachers voting and commenting on suggested good sites. Good idea -well one only in its genesis at the moment. So it is time to get back to social networking site NING – not much development but found this wonderful article that I am still digesting by Danah Boyd –‘Incantations for Muggles’.(If nothing else it gets me away from my technodrool?)
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