UKOLN Wiki Workshop 2006: Talks
UKOLN Wiki Workshop 2006: TalksFour plenary talks were given at the Exploiting The Potential Of Wikis workshop.
Steven Warburton gave a talk on "Wikis and Collaboration: Approaches to Deploying Wikis in Educational Settings".
Slides: [About] - [MS PowerPoint format] - [HTML]
Wikis are not new, yet despite a low-key presence since the mid 1990s they have only recently reached mainstream deployment as simple collaborative tools for research and community-based knowledge repositories (cf. Wikipedia). What conceptual and cultural changes have occurred which now make wikis such a popular choice for sharing content? And, importantly for this session, how can they be exploited within an educational environment? This talk will explore the use of wikis through a series of case studies which outline differing approaches to their deployment within a variety of learning and teaching settings. A critical appraisal of the rise of social software and Web 2.0 technologies will form a backdrop to the discussions and the possibilities afforded by wikis will be examined through comparisons of Internet based use against the particular demands of the institution. The focus will be on the collaborative nature of new and emerging technologies and developing pedagogical designs which exploit effective integration into the educational process. The theoretical implications of 'communities of practice' (Wenger 1998) and 'networked collaborative e-learning' (McConnell 2006) will be used to address the belief that wikis can promote a democratic engagement with learning where students can situate themselves both as consumers and producers of knowledge.
Henry Rzepa gave a talk on "Wikis and (Meta)data Rich Environments: a Model for Scholarly Publishing".
This speaker will try to persuade the audience that Wikis are an excellent (if still young and immature) medium for allowing both students and researchers in "data rich" subjects (the speaker is a chemist, an area where this is certainly true) to collaborate and communicate in a sensible (synonym = semantic) manner. The environment needs to be able to accept data readily, to present it graphically and immediately, and to enable its re-use. To do this, the medium needs rich metadata, describing this data. One particular incarnation of wiki, MediaWiki, supports an excellent variety of add-ons (one, Jmol, used to render molecules will be demonstrated), and especially, interesting emerging mechanisms for capturing the metadata in a semantic, bidirectional manner (such as, for example, RDF). The semantic Wiki provides an easy mechanism to author such metadata in a contextual manner. If the speaker manages to get it working in time for talk, he would hope to demonstrate this! The ultimate objective is to head off towards the Scholarly journal with this environment. The journal should be both data and metadata rich, collaborative, and symmetric. Whilst the current model is clearly write once/read many, should we move to a model closer to write many/read many, or at least annotate many/read many? Could publishers either accept such models, or make money from them? What does it mean for tertiary STM publishers, who have traditionally held a monopoly on "added value" publishing. Will the semantic wiki be such an 'added value' environment? Perhaps we will find at least some answers to these questions during the workshop!
Brian Kelly gave a talk on "Reflections On Personal Experiences In Using Wikis".
In this talk Brian Kelly reviews his experiences with a range of Wiki tools over the past two years. Brian describes the strength and weaknesses of the tools, review the different types of Wikis and outlines some of the issues which need to be addressed when seeking to make effective use of various types of Wikis.
Slides: [About] - [MS PowerPoint format] - [HTML]
Phil Wilson has been evaluating Wiki software for use at the University of Bath. In this talk he will describe how the University's requirements were derived, the evaluation criteria he has been using and report on the strengths and weaknesses of some of the software he has looked at.
