All our wiki are belong to you
What constitutes the art of engagement with regard to quotidian uses ofopen access environments like wikis and blogs? Wikis are widely used in university settings today. Conference wikis allow presenters and attendees to add and edit content before and afterthe event. Wikis allow geographically separated collaborators to collect ideas and work together on documents. There also other useful tools such as SubEthaEdit for this purpose.
Wikis can serve as a personal notebook and are useful for student journaling in order to develop a writing proficiency. Such writing exposes degrees of understanding of knowledge and can establish the habit of regular reflection. Peers and instructors can jointly review the writing.
Wikis are contributions to the Access To Knowledge (A2K) movement: they contribute knowledge to the commons. Commitment to scholarly work, John Willinsky writes, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. “Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed.”
Class room reports about the hands-on experiences on the ground, however, are missing. In the course “Death, Data, & Desire” we used a MediaWiki this semester.
<http://wiki.critical-netcultures.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>
It is common wisdom that without a degree of closedness wikis get quickly spammed. We kept our course wiki closed during the semester to have a safe environment for experimentation and the development of ideas. But in the end it was important to open it. The potential of wikis goes far beyond single author editing. Do you know of exemplary course wikis that are 1) cooperatively assembled and 2) really push the properties of the medium? How does the wiki structure work on our thoughts? Where are exemplary wikis that put that format to full collective use in the described context?
The meaningful orchestration of group uses of wikis does not have many references yet. The potential is the integration of several successive courses in one wiki in which students can build on each other’s findings and connect to one another. They can create reflective linkages among their works and texts.
When developing and maintaining collaborative student knowledge repositories, structure matters. Wikis are easy to edit collaboratively but can create monumental mess when used by a group. A sea of links and submenus will suffocate even the last bit of content. We found that the creation of templates became an important step in the use of the course wiki. Without the uniform use of templates, information would get flushed down the sink of the database. Apart from templates, the structure of each page turned out to be clearer if most information was kept on one page, using MediaWiki automated indexing feature.
<http://wiki.critical-netcultures.net/wiki/index.php/Al>
<http://wiki.critical-netcultures.net/wiki/index.php/Socially_Networked_Video>
Several commercial incarnations of wikis understand this issue well: many wiki farms offer a clear templated structure. Clients can set up a free wiki that is not password protected in any way, which makes them useless for any serious, long-term use. Like with open source software you pay for the bottle while the water is free. The convenience of prefabricated templates gets people through the door.
Weblogs, in comparison, are useful teaching tools but we found that they are inferior to wikis in many respects. An advantage of blogs is that commenting on each other’s work is straightforward. It is easy to see who comments on whose work. Assignments here included a compulsory length of post, number of external links per post, and comments. However, content gets swallowed by the blog hinterland and despite tag clouds and monthly archives, blog interfaces do not offer comprehensive and clear access to the content contained in a blog’s database.
Contrary to the famous net phenomenon we say: “All our wiki are belong to you.”
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References:
All your base are belong to us
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us>
A2K Wiki
<http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>
PbWiki: the world’s biggest commercial wiki farm
<http://pbwiki.com/about/>
Subethaedit-- collaborative work forum
<http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/>
Seed Wiki
<http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/seed_wiki/seed_wiki.cfm>
A comparison of wiki platforms
<http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/10/30/free-hosted-wikis-comparison-of-wiki-farms/>
Download page MediaWiki:
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download>
OpenMute
<http://3d.openmute.org/modules/wakka/OmOneGettingStarted>
Willinsky, J. (2005) The Access Principle. The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge: MIT.
Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Cambridge: MIT.
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