A NAKED WIKI: How to use Wikis for Teaching and Learning

1. About this page

The Naked Wiki is a practical look at examples of how wikis are being used for teaching and learning. It will consider the background, development, and creative ways in which wikis are slowly emerging as an extremely creative and flexible tool for all sorts of purposes, situations and students. It is a demonstration of a collaborative wiki with contributions from many people.

1.1 Ownership, contributions and history of the page

• I am impressed, and grateful that people took time to write and contribute to this page, despite their busy lives. Thank you all.
• Note that all contributions are acknowledged with their avatar alongside, and any content without avatars is my contribution.

Who	When	What
Paul Penfold,	September 2006	This page was created by Paul as part of the FET8611 course. Please comment on it using hidden inline comments with quicktags or hidden comments or add comment at the bottom of the page. You may reuse the content under the knowlegeGarden copyright policy.
Lynda,	September 2006	Questions on wiki software
Perdita,	September 2006	Tidied up original page before it 'imploded.' Thank you Perdita
Bruce,	September 2006	Suggestions for software. Also thanks to Bruce for spending 2 hours trying to locate the 'imploded' page - what a friend!
Leigh,	September 2006	Further recommendations on wiki software
Jean,	September 2006	Examples of teaching and learning with wikis
Michael,	September 2006	Tidied up and edited this page. Thanks a lot Michael.
Colin,	September 2006	Made some edits to this page, thank you.
Bea (allanb)	October 2006	Hosting or not hosting your wiki
Alan,	October 2006	Spiking or malicious editing of wikis
Andrew,	October 2006	Comment and wikis in teaching and learning
Penny,	October 2006	Comment on paper on collaborative learning using a wiki (lack of success)
Cherie,	October 2006	Comment on participation in collaborative learning environments
Aliya,	October 2006	Project management using wikis

1.2 Summary of this page

"I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me." —Bob Dylan

It will explore examples and uses of wikis in teaching and learning with links to learning theories and teaching practice. Encouraging students to participate and collaborate can be challenging, especially in traditional institutions. Breaking the mold, and finding practical models that work are what this page is all about.

Peers from this course are invited to share their experiences in using wikis for teaching, contributions are also welcome from other USQ courses using Knowledge Garden (thank you Penny) and I am hoping to get one or two colleagues from the School of Hotel & Tourism Management at Hong Kong PolyU to contribute, as we try to put some of these ideas into practice.

2. What are Wikis and why do they offer so much potential to education?

"Wikis allow teachers and learners to maximize the potential of print for digital natives by utilizing print in its electronic or digital form. For instance, wikis can be used for collaborative activities such as Web-writing or problem-solving, for information sources or case libraries, for submission of student assignments, and for project spaces. These uses draw on the traditional print paradigm with variations provided by a technology that remains on the leading edge of the technology wave"

(

Ferris, S., and H. Wilder. 2006

)

Using wikis in educational settings

Acknowledgement:

“Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaboration” by Jonah Bossewitch (Used with Permission)

2.1 Possibilities for teaching & learning

For many of us who teach, finding ways to use wikis effectively and appropriately (rather than just for content dumping) is challenging, and this is what this page is all about – examples of how to use this emerging technology for teaching and learning. Unfortunately, academically, we are moving in the wrong direction. "

We still see content as the heart of learning. It's reflected in LMS', eportfolio tools, content management systems, and knowledge management approaches

," according to

George Siemans

That said, there are some exciting and innovative things happening in the wiki education world, and the momentum is moving wiki development into all sorts of areas through primary school to postgraduate education. This critical mass will have an impact I am sure, but it is whether institutions will take over developments and try and control and monitor them (as with LMS') or whether unscrupulous vendors such as Blackboard/WebCT will patent the idea and try to make money out of a social and community-based concept.

2.1 Definition

“

A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring

. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedias such as

Wikipedia

. (Wikipedia, 2006)

2.2 How wikis work

Once we understand the structure and format of wiki pages, it becomes relatively easy to generate a new page, as wikis are a fairly simple technology, and that is the attraction of them for many people. Wikis are generated in plain text with some simple wiki coding, rather than in html, and this makes them a more ‘human-friendly’ way of producing web pages – all you need is a web browser. The great ‘plus’ with using wikis to generate content is their simplicity, speed and accessibility – although it normally takes time to become proficient and efficient in using them.

2.3 Limitations of wikis

“

Wikis are not automatic ‘successes,’ much less a cure-all

” (Ebersbach, Glaser & Heigl, 2006), and the same writers suggest there are many limitations to effective use of wikis, including: lack of interest from contributors and readers, resistance from employers, institutions and others threatened by ‘open’ systems, vandalism, ‘vanity’ contributors, quality assurance, objective/neutral writing and open editing amongst others. However, the plus factors far outweigh the negatives as we shall see in this page.

Cherie. Paul, my biggest concern with wikis (and many other technologies!) is how to create motivation in students to become involved in this type of collaborative environment. I teach 11-14 year olds and (unfortunately) their main motivation for participating is grades. How do you change this mentality? How can we as educators inspire intrinsic motivation in learners? On the other hand, what exactly defines participation? I have read an interesting article by Misook Heo that suggests that a consistent reader of a discussion board, wiki etc. who does not contribute in writing is as much as a participant in the learning environment as someone who posts consistently. Food for thought...

2.4 Challenges to using Wikis

Some public wikis have been spectacular failures. For example, in 2005 the Los Angeles Times wanted to allow users to edit editorials on a "wikitorial." However, after a few days, as readers were encouraged to co-write an editorial on the Iraq war there were so many conflicts and disagreements that it had to be closed down. Recently, the Defra government website in the U.K. had a similar problem. Opposition-led contributions killed the effort to get public contributions to an environmental contract, and the result was a locked wiki.

2.5 Dangers of Wikis

Andrew. This is a very thought provoking title Paul as a wiki is very exposed as it can be edited by anyone or did you have any other reason for calling it this question? I have always had the mind set on webpages to protect them from people editing them as hackers are trying to get into pages to do damage, but a wiki is encouraging it. That is a fantastic concept and wikipedia is an example of how this works in both ways I suppose. My kids use it all the time for research, but they are aware to check against other sources. Is everyone aware of this, I am not so sure?

3. The influence and growth of wikis

3.1 The social context of blogs and wikis

Jean Clayton says: I found an interesting article relating to the changing social context of blogs and wikis, which may be of interest in this section --a short extract along with the link so that you can see the context:

"''Until recently, the term ‘online community’ implied a community who interacted online within some bounded set of technologies. ... The boundaries were created by the tools themselves – usernames, passwords, registrations or joining of a list. The technological act of joining was the most visible indicator of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the community. Communities could be public or private and visible only to those who joined.

... We happily played with wikis as shared writing or repository spaces. We adopted blogs as personal publishing platforms, but community always found its infrastructural roots in forums and email lists, tools that many of us felt defined online conversation.

Then blog adoption accelerated. People began to blog in specific niches, from gaming, to politics, to third grade classroom curriculum, to chocolate; ecosystems of people writing about things they cared about. They started finding each other, commenting on each others’ blogs. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feedreaders began to offer new possibilities about how we discovered and read blog posts. Other Web 2.0 tools such as tagging and mashups created ways to aggregate and remix the individual offerings into a unique package, customised by each of us to our own preferences.

The game had changed. And with it changed some of our assumptions about what online community looks like, how individual and collective identity, power and control show up in these communities, and, at the core, the balance between the individual and the group''.'~~" The source is Nancy White, Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?

Educational use of wikis

3.2 Supporting others learning and providing information

My experiences on wikis are limited so far to the FET8611 course and the One Stop Help Shop page where I have experimented with using a wiki in a customer support context. This would be more the learning focus. Layout of a wiki and keeping it readable after it is edited by others is an important consideration that I was trying to explore.

People could remove, alter or add content that is not appropriate. As editing, in Tikiwiki, is text based this causes problems of people having to learn an editor as well. So there is checking and comparing required on a regular basis. Without the history tool and no spellchecker, this can be a time consuming task. What was added today? Was it appropriate? All this aside, if people are interested and want to have a say, wikis would be a great learning/teaching tool to be able to interact with each other.

3.3 Collaboration and its importance in learning

There's an interesting paper by Jonathan Davies of the University of York, Sept 2004 'Wiki Brainstorming and Problems with Wiki Based Collaboration'. He found that collaborative learning didn't work in his context. Extract from the abstract of the article: "A design for evaluating the use of wiki as a shared workspace for asynchronous distributed brainstorming is described. Implementation of this design was unsuccessful and it was considered that failure may be the result of fundamental problems with wiki as a collaborative technology. A revised design is presented for the evaluation of problems with wiki-based collaboration and the factors affecting such collaboration, based on hypotheses derived in part from traditional brainstorming research." Penny

3.4 Constructivism, teaching roles and wikis

Wikis underlying philosophy, as far as it influences teaching and learning, is constructivism. It is all about empowering students, it is about giving up control, it is about cooperation and learning from others. The teacher's role changes from providing content, managing learning and controlling students to establishing contexts or setting up problems to engage students. The teacher will set the stage, or initiate interactions, but it is the student who gains autonomy over his work. This lessening of control is hard for many teachers, but examples show that the more control that is relinquished the more effective the student engagement in the work. "

It’s a safe bet that wiki-like writing spaces will be featured in future course management systems—along with other "social software" tools and protocols such as weblogs and RSS—but if practices don’t evolve, the effects on student learning will be superficial at best.

" (Lamb, 2004)

4. Practical examples of wikis in teaching and learning

4.1 How to set up your education wiki

Chuck Bennet

is developing some key resources that would be useful to teachers who are just starting out with wikis. Some useful handouts include:

• WikiLearning (Introductory handout for parents)
• Permission form (for student's work & picture to be published on the Internet)
• WikiTimeSheet
• CodeSheet (Key for some of the code)
• WikiTextPages (Adding Text Page #'s to a WikiOutline)
• Adding Definitions
• Creating Contents Pages
• Cleaning up, FactChecking, Plagiarism Police, Wikifying

4.2 Group projects

Example:

Bruce,

The Tool Group

is a group assessment submission, with

The Tool Group

wiki page utilised intensively for collaborative work

An experiment in wiki groupwork

I plan to use wikis for class group projects next semester. This is how it will work a) Form students into online teams of 4 or 5 (which they stay in for the tutorials too). We set up five different team study activities based on different topics in the syllabus and students have 4-5 weeks to complete the work. Each team will collaborate online and develop their team task and the flow of ideas and arguments can be seen by the tutor online in the discussion area. The team task will require groups to look at a real work issue, problem or case, explore the issues, and draw their conclusions. Teams will discuss, agree, prepare and post an online team project to their tutorial group, then the rest of the tutorial group will peer-review each team’s work against a set of criteria, and this will be the basis of 5% of the grade. This will be a public grade viewable by all the tutorial group. Teams will also peer review their own team members and allocate a grade for contribution to the team itself and the individual effort of their teammates. This will give up to 5% of the grade. The team peer reviews will be anonymous and the result for each student generated automatically The tutor will add 5% of the grade to teams for completion and effort, not for quality.

The benefits of this method are many:

• Students have to learn teamwork, and collaboration skills.
• They will be fairly demanding of each other, and therefore a high quality of work should ensue.
• They will learn from each other, and broaden their understanding of the topics.
• They will learn to evaluate and make assessments against criteria, thus understanding and applying CRA themselves.
• This is a more well-rounded activity, and the end result can be used for the next time the course is taught

4.3 Collaborative writing

Wiki's are a new experience for me personally.

Having said that my English team has introduced Wiki pages to our students. We are using Wikispaces which is easy to use and has a free component and components that they charge for. The free component does contain ads, but does not seem too cluttered. If you want a free Wiki without Ad's gnacademy might be a solution.

We have introduced the Wiki for English and hope to get the students to use it as an E-Portfilio for their written work. This will provide the student with a way to submit and re-submit writing tasks(Based on teacher feedback) in an easy to find and use electronic environment.

My team has discussed the use of Wiki's for collaborative work in the business subjects but with the level of student we are dealing with have issues with the free wikis in terms of access by others. Free Wikis at least Wikispaces charge if you want to limit who can view a Wiki. Having said this, I think Wiki's have a lot of potential for use in collaborative projects, especially where the students are at long distances from each other.

The Tool Group is a collaborative group. The Tool Group wiki page provides the basis for this collaboration

4.4 Teamwork

Jean C says: I have two situations that could be enhanced by emerging learning tools, and will investigate both scenarios as my Assignment 3 in the course, and so people might like to keep in touch with the progress of these, which I will report on the Lingua page.

I teach a group of Stage 1 ESL students (all from overseas, Yr 11, average age 16 years). Most are certainly digital natives, efficient in their use of mobile phones for a range of purposes + IPods + online resources and tools, although some less privileged students from China and Vietnam are less aware of possibilities. They are an extremely sociable and lively group. I would like to offer them more innovative and constructivist teaching methodology than the curriculum I have inherited would appear to open up. I need them to read and write frequently and collaboratively, with feedback, to extend their English literacy. The research topic we are working on at the moment lends itself ideally to the emerging technologies, because it is The Future of Work ( robotics, nuclear medicine. emerging/disappearing jobs, outsourcing/offshoring, telecommuting, etc)

We have one 2 hour session scheduled in the computer lab each week and so far have been simply using this for research and PPT presentations. I would like the Wiki to refocus this time and to develop a read-write web with this group. My proposal is to set up three kinds of structures within this, monitor how they develop, and get feedback from the class on how this helps their learning.

• a group of two or three “whole class” pages, seeded with some questions and links as starting points, to see where these go when taken over by the students, but teacher specifying that an individual contribution needs to be made to this page each lesson
• a single page for each small group of 4 students (x 4 groups) to work on their own specific research project eg suggestions from the students to date are things like being an architect in the future, working in films in the future. This “group page” would simply have a template set up that they can modify to suit their theme. I would select the student groupings to ensure a range of language and technical abilities and cultural backgrounds, but leave them to decide their own topics for research and own structure for presenting it. These pages would be a common repository for ideas and serve as an electronic portfolio for the research phase of the assessment. They might also choose to use the Wiki for the presentation phase of the project
• they are also setting up their own individual pages to play with as they like in journal format, and given some time in each session to work on these. This I hope lets me get to know them better as individuals in a non-threatening way as I see the “personality” they give these pages and I can also see what tools and technologies they use in creating these that can be shared with the group.

You can see work in progress at Future of Work pages.

The Tool Group is a team of FET8604 students collaborating on a final assessment. The Tool Group wiki page provides the basis for tasks to be clearly allocated and measured.

4.5 Glossaries and instructions

Glossaries

Good uses of wikis can include simple things such as glossaries. Students can be asked to help compile a glossary of technical terms that the whole class can use as a reference. This would work best for a technical subject such as medicine where there are many definitions. Students could be divided into groups to research and define, or they could work individually and assigned terms from a-c or d-f etc.

Instructions

Part of the wiki can be used to set out instructions for the class. This could include the following:

• Syllabus
• Schedule
• Assignments
• Assessment rubrics
• Readings

etc

4.6 Wikis as e-Portfolios

Wikis have been used for creating an e-portfolio for students with less technical skills or for students who just don’t wish to spend the extra time to learn about yet another system. I have been looking for a way to do this that would be free of university control, and portable so that students could take it with them when they graduate. One option I came across is TiddlyWiki. The good thing about the system is that it does not require any database, php or scripting. The entire tool is contained in one html file using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Which makes the wiki very portable, and can be run in any modern browser. As suggested on the website, students could also install

PortableFirefox

on their USB drives. This would make updating/showing the e-portfolio very portable as well. However, to save the changes of the wiki page, it requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, plus the ability to save to a server.

Students could produce their artifacts in a local copy of the wiki file in a folder on their computers. Then upload the final version and all associated files (contents in the folder) to a server. Since the wiki system uses simple formatting syntax, students could easily build their wiki page (including the navigation) by following the wiki’s formatting rules.

4.7 Study guides and wikibooks

This option really excites me. It would be possible to have students working on projects or assignments with a view to publishing them as

WikiBooks

or as part of

Wikiversity

pages. For example students could prepare chapters for a course using a wiki, then they could be consolidated into a wikibook and made available on Wikibooks for anyone to use of for the next year students to reference.

This option could also be used for study guides, using the same principles as above.

4.8 Q&As

One of my colleagues has opened a course wiki to provide a place for students to ask questions about her course. We chose PbWiki - as it allows anonymous comments (students just need the password issued by the teacher) and it is ad free. It is also clean and attractive compared to many basic wikis. Have a look here - the password is 'teaching'.

This is a very simple use of a wiki, and could be extended to other purposes to support a course.

4.9 Supporting distance learners

Jean C says: I have a small private class in a small country town to whom I have been teaching Italian for the last 20 weeks, 2 hours per week. The situation is uneconomic, with over an hour to travel each way and not enough fees, and so I will terminate at the end of this term, but I don’t want to abandon them. All have internet access, and so I am thinking about a Wiki

• that is quite tightly structured to present learning materials in a sequence that will support learning at this level
• which creates open areas where they can learn by interacting with each other and with other people who may wish to help us.

I am learning Chinese myself, and found ChinesePod http://www.chinesepod.com/, which offers online audio-podding supported by a range of materials, which may offer a model. I can imagine how I could use audio-podding tools and see what else might be useful in language development and cultural input. I would like to see what would be involved in setting this up in terms of opportunities and inhibitors, and report on progress.

Hot Potatoes is being used for quizzes (cloze, multiple choice, mixed up text, matching vocab exs) plus links to the wealth of existing online resources, which I am sorting into data banks appropriate for each "lesson" (by topic and level of difficulty).

You are invited to offer suggestions for working with these effectively. We are using Wetpaint. You are welcome to see work in progress atFutureWork. One problem we have identified with this one is that you cannot easily upload your own word files or ppts as links, only if you have them already online with a URL, and so we are creating subpages for these.

4.10 Using Wikipedia for class projects

This is a very practical page from Wikipedia which helps teachers plan and

implement a Wikipedia project for their classes

. Here is the introduction from the page which explains how it works:

"

If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university, we encourage you to use Wikipedia in your class as an example of an open content website that works (or doesn't). You are not the first person to do so, and many of these projects have resulted in both advancing the student's knowledge and useful content being added to Wikipedia. An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educative but also makes it more interesting ("the world gets to see my work"), probably resulting in increased dedication. Besides, it will give the students a chance to collaborate on course notes and papers, and their effort will remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper course-work

."

• Please read Wikipedia:school and university projects - instructions for teachers and lecturers.
• You may also find Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students useful as a resource for your students.
• There is also an syllabus boilerplate that you may want to use.

4.11 Writing with wikis

This may be useful for English teachers

Lingua

. Wikis can be used to support both individual or collaborative writing. You can use wikis for:

• making the draft and revision process visible to teachers, encouraging academic honesty and discouraging plagiarism.
• writing can be private or public depending on your requirements
• teachers can check progress, edits, history and monitor student contributions
• you can give students comments and feedback on a document
• Students can save wiki work to their personal portfolios.

For group writing you can:

• encourage collaborative writing with many students contributing to the same article
• encourage students to produce writing and make it available publicly
• save time, as students can contribute remotely.

5. What Wiki software to use__

Lynda asks: Do you have any recommendations re wiki software? I have looked at wetpaint.com and it's easy to use but has ads, which I don't like. I have also seen seedwiki but haven't tried that out.

URinvited2

to share your experiences here in answer to Lynda's question

Other wikis suitable for education include:

Lynda, I use pbwiki.com (peanut butter wiki) for my class. It doesn't have a lot of advertising which is nice. My husband has started (as of this semester) to use it in order for students to develop an e-portfolio (as Bruce mentioned - how is that working out?) They can also read each others work so it also helps students to get to know each other better and encourages peer review. You can view this at http://drotr.pbwiki.com/ I know he would appreciate any feedback. Leigh

Jean C comments: I have been looking around for tools and approaches to use in my project and finding some interesting links for web constructions, such as http://realtoolbox.blogspot.com

Paul's comment: If you want ad free software, you might want to consider hosting a wiki on your own server. Some free open source wikis include MediaWiki (used by Wikipedia), Phpwiki and Tikiwiki. A simple comparison of open source wikis "Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?" is here.

I have tried Wikispaces and am now using PBWiki (the Peanut Butter wiki) which is free of advertisements. It offers 10MB of storage space, secure login, RSS/Atom feeds.

Bea (allanb) says:

There is many a good Wiki to download and host on your own server, but this often isn't viable. MediaWiki is my current choice for it's embeddable media types (including mind maps). However here's a quick list of the hosted variety from searching the big G:

http://www.wikidot.com/new-site

http://www.wetpaint.com/

http://www.jotspot.com/

Wikipedia

How to start a Wiki (including hosting list)

Comparison of Wiki farms

Bumble Bee - Two great free hosted wiki services

10 ten list

Which hosted Wiki is right for you?

Project Management using Wikis

Aliya, We have been experimenting with a very simple wiki with a web-based project management software package called "Basecamp" (http://www.basecamphq.com/). While this is not a very powerful tool in terms of functionality - it's simplicity is key. Users who have never encountered this kind of application before are able to use it with relatively little assistance. Further to this, the packaging of the wiki in with the rest of the software (with which users are already familiar) is a real bonus.

6. Pedagogical challenges

6.1 Control or anarchy?

Lynda: I have set up a wiki project with a small group of adult EFL learners. We have been working on this in class time but not much has been happening out of class, although the students to computers. Today we spent time in class clarifying the project. I suspect as this is a non-assessed task, students are less interested in spending time on it than for something that will get them marks. I have tried to build in an intrinsic motivation by having a real audience (new students) and saying we will "launch" the wiki to the rest of the school at the end of this course (two weeks time).

As one of my aims in doing this is to involve the students in a colloborative project, I don't want to be too directive. However, I can see my directions and expectations needed to be clearer.

6.2 Managing and assessing

As mentioned earlier, it is challenging to manage a wiki project - as the teacher cannot really control what goes on (it is possible to try, but evidence shows that highly controlled wikis do not flourish). Best to set up the frameworks, there are good examples on the web, and then let students get on with it - they soon find a level. It is possible to intervene and provide guidance and notes to keep students from doing outlandish things, or negative posting, but my experience so far is that students can be quite proud of their writing, and are not generally negative or destructive.

As far as assessment is concerned you can choose to grade wiki assignments on participation only, or as I have done, by setting criteria, creating rubrics, and assessing each student's work and participation. I have produced some assessment rubrics which focus on peer group assessment. As wikis are a peer collaborative tool, peer assessment would see to be appropriate:

Criteria

• Team member produced many new ideas.
• Team member initiated organization of tasks.
• Team member helped other team members when asked.
• Team member listened to others’ ideas.
• Team member checked with others and offered help if needed.
• Team member was always prepared to work, met deadlines for tasks, and worked hard.
• Team member was willing to make up for work others didn’t do and to spend extra time to complete the project.

Criteria would also focus on organization, structure, comprehensiveness, focus on topic, references etc

Assessing collaborative work is difficult to assess, but Wikis help solve this problem by making iterative development of the document visible through the history tab. While this might make take more time, teachers can review the history of each page to assess both individual contributions and to supervise the writing and revision process. Moreover, wikis also provide a way for students to document the writing process and make this visible to instructors. Outlines, timelines, task lists, and group activity can all be kept on the content pages of the wiki. This makes it possible to assess the process of writing as well as the product. Indeed, a wiki may be used only to support the teamwork process.

The assessment process may also include rounds of peer- and self-assessment that require students to reflect on both the products and the process of their collaborative work.

6.3 Malicious editing

As another topic. I am wondering if there is an issue of Spimming, Splogging and other NET Menaces or in this case Spliking...(a new word perhaps?) in WIKI's. In other words, those univited menaces filling up WIKI sites with junk and general mayhem? Any thoughts on this...You can drop a comment to my Blog.

We might expect spammers to increase their spam after a webmaster newsletter highlighted the effectiveness of Wiki spam in raising a site's Google ranking.

WebProNews

described how to improve ranking in search engine optimization using links in Wiki "sandboxes." Some

suggestions on how to tackle spam

is here.

Shlomi Fish

Suggests six ways to protect MediaWiki wikis:

• Monitoring the RSS/Atom Feeds.
• Install and enable the MediaWiki SpamBlacklist extension, and making sure the master list is updated.
• MediaWiki ships with a spam cleanup script that cleans all spam from a certain (exact) hostname.
• Requiring users to login helps reduce the spam a lot. Some spammers don't bother logging in.
• Using Captchas (= garbled images with text) can reduce the amount of spam considerably.
• Requiring an email confirmation after the creation of the wiki account, and before one can edit pages.

Stemming the menace of wiki spamming

6.4 Beyond the World of WiKi's

Alan,

I am very visual learner so KG and text based learning does little to stimulate me. But having said this the WiKi's I have developed are pushing me to see another side of learning environments. But now I am now looking beyond WiKi's at 3D visual enviornments....for a Stimulating Link....Please check out my PLUG...PLUG...

Another Second Life

page. Thanks

7. Related web sites

• Encylopedia of Educational Technology
• Wide Open Spaces: Wikis
• 7 things you should know about Wikis
• Educational Wikis

8.References

• Ebersbach, Glaser & Heigl, (2006) Wiki Web Collaboration, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, New York
• Wikipedia (2006) Retrieved on 6.10.06 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
• Davies, J., (2004) Wiki Brainstorming and Problems with Wiki Based Collaboration, University of York Computer Science Project, Sept 2004, accessed 14 October 2006 from: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble/teaching/students/Jonathan_Davies/Jonathan_Davies.html
• Ferris, S., and H. Wilder. 2006. Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom. Innovate 2 (5). retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=258 on October 14, 2006).
• Bossewitch, J, (2006) Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaboration, Poster presentation at Wikimania 2006 retrieved from http://jonahboss.fastmail.fm/wikimania/wikimania_poster.pdf on 14 October 2006
• Lamb, B, 2004, Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 36–48. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/apps/ER/ERM04/ERM0452.asp on 6 October 2006