An important message lies in this Australian experiment -- mixing both information and instruction are essential for public use of e-learning material. I wrote about this strategy in 2001 under the title of Blending Information and Instruction. What I did then, and guess what is still relevant today, is to look at companies that were providing exemplar online support. I chose Macromedia, Adobe and Apple back then and analyzed their online support strategy. These companies offered both information in the form of knowledge bases and instruction in the form of small modules and full-blown courses. This is the same strategy the Austrade pilot has implemented with success.

10:55:29 PM    

Heh... this had to happen... and good that it has...  looks like I totally missed SnipSnap, JSPWiki, Instiki, Socialtext (although looks like it could be pricey) and a whole heap of stuff that Oliver ruminated on yesterday including Zwiki (& version Personal Wiki), VoodooPad (& Vpwiki) and even something along the lines of SubEthaEdit... will have to develop this more I think.

10:51:49 AM    

Keeping on the wiki theme, I've had a 'mini' crack at this before but, um, I've changed my mind :o) and lordy, it's probably only fair to draw up some kind of 'criteria' for wiki-selection... before I do though can I make clear that I'm looking at Wikis for a specific purpose here:

-To use in a higher education context with groups ranging from 20 to 1000 students
-To use for tasks ranging from short collaborative projects to developing social dynamics to ongoing collaboration & communication
-To use with specific courses on an 'amateur' basis... no real $ floating around here, and no institutional objectives (as yet)

And that like it as I don't I have to play by the technical rules in place... i.e. if you don't run on PHP / MySQL then you don't run... so what we end up using may not be the best option, it may just be the best option that fits.

Oh yeah, and I'm prone to getting confused about technical stuff, making huge omissions and getting things plain wrong :o)

So, taken that things like simultaneous editing and version control are a given, what do we want in a wiki, in no particular order:

-Free / Affordable & PHP & MySQL based

-Something we can host ourselves (while having a service hosted by someone else is a great plus for the non-techie individual teacher - whom I would probably encourage to use a service hosted by someone else -, these projects will undoubtedly involve multiple tutors who will only really be happy if we have 'control' (in terms of backing up & supporting) the system)

-WYSIWYG editor or suitable formatting help (fact is, students and teachers unfamiliar with wikis will need this in order to feel that they can use the system effectively... this is not to say that you can't have good formatting help though, for example and ever present guide to how to format with wiki styles)

-Obvious page creator (WikiWords, while beautifully simple, just won't do it... there needs to be an icon or a 'Create New Page' link)

-Email / RSS enabled (People need to be able to subscribe to pages (not whole wikis!) and 'watch them' - as I'm not doing this with a bunch o' bloggers this needs to be available primarily as email updates when things are changed... additionally RSS would be good, but please not instead of!)

-Easy Attachments, Images & File Sharing (This has got to be as easy as attaching a document to an email or putting an image in a Word document)

-Security Settings (Need to be able to lock some pages and allow different types of access)

-Comments Feature (Need to be able to comment on these pages... email updates on these are a must too!)

-That Personal Touch (At its most simple users need to be able to log in, have their own page and give themselves a 'signature' so that when they edit people can see who they are and they can easily track what the have done)

-Flexibility of Design (It needs to be able to be easily adaptable to it's environment... for example to be able to be CSSed as appropriate)

Does anybody think I'm being unreasonable here or have missed anything key? I'm going to ponder it for a while and then try to draw up a kinda comparison chart (with comments) for all the wikis that've come up.

10:48:24 AM