Associate Professor Michael Bowen is developing a new open source wiki specifically designed for classroom education and is keen to get input from other teachers. He read my article on the Best Wiki for Classroom Education and left a comment, so I contacted him for more details.
Mike is associate professor of science education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has a research grant for the development of a tool to support students working on collaborative science projects. He developed several tools for the wikka wiki but his work has now extended into a whole new fork. As he was writing his comment on my article, he decided to extend even further and make available a non-commercial wiki option for setting up a classroom wiki.
He has registered the domain name www.clikkawiki.com and plans to launch a “pre-release” version of the classroom education wiki on the site in the next month or so. Plans may be delayed as he has just lost his student programmer. However, the outcome will be a non-commercial wiki for classroom education that you can set up on your own LAMP server. Thus, no ads, no harassment, etc.
Clikka wiki extended wiki for classroom education
The wiki is designed specifically for use with high school kids, but Mike uses a great number of the tools in teaching his university courses. Essentially the ‘classroom wiki’ is a cross between a course-management and a wiki system so that a teacher can “run” a course but also allow students to integrate their own use (running class projects, assignments etc) with the class system. The “free flowing” benefits of a wiki are combined with structured communication tools (forums, blogs).
The “typical” wiki features found in wikka wiki are integrated with:
- Bulletin Board
- Forum
- Discussion threads
- Blogs
- Linkmanager
Any student who has page access can set up a Bulletin Board, forum, thread, blog, etc. Mike wants to empower regular users without needing an administrator to give them permission to do these sorts of things.
The Bulletin Board interface is used as the portal for the system and integrates the blog, forum, thread and LinkManager tools with consistent color scheme, look and feel.
Wiki provides wide range of tools
A wide range of tools complement this comprehensive framework. These currently include:
- IM Chat
- Simple Paint/Drawing and Graphing
- Spreadsheet with simple statistics
- Tagging
- Page notes (so you can annotate other people’s wiki pages and an organiser so that you can easily find the annotations you have made)
- Calendaring/Scheduling tools
- Presentation tools (a simple version of something like PowerPoint…that leaves it’s notes visible online)
- Polling (T/F, M/C and open-ended with simple analysis)
- Contact list
- Buddies list (with tracking of pages they’ve been to)
- Gallery (to view drawings or graphs the user has created)
- Project tool (combines project blog, images with comments and spreadsheets on one page)
An interesting new feature called “MyTown” allows users to subset the whole wiki to only those pages of their friends, their pages, their “favourite” pages and admin pages.
Wiki admin reflects teachers needs
The solid set of admin features include page locking/hiding, page and username banning, image upload approval system, backup system (of images, database and files), “hide” forum contributions, etc.
Registration can be keyed to a password or locked. Permissions for editing, viewing and commenting can be defined for each page.
A “Block” system allows students to block someone from contributing to various tools (blogs, forums etc) on their pages, sending them “mail” or seeing their name in forums etc.
Simple editing
There is no WYSIWYG editing, which is currently limited to markup. However tables are easy to construct and there is YouTube and image embedding. Currently only images that have been approved and are already available on the wiki can be inserted.
Extendable open source wiki
One of the advantages of using wikka wiki as a starting point is that wikka wiki is open source and has a system that makes it easy for people to develop and use their own tools.
Give Mike some feedback
Mike is happy to listen to suggestions. If you leave a comment on this page, I will make sure Mike gets it.
Tagged with: Education • Wiki
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