[DG: Teaching & Learning] Teaching & Learning] Wiki's and Sakai
Goodwin-Davey, Alice
Goodwaa at unisa.ac.za
Thu Apr 9 04:24:13 PDT 2009
Hello:
I hope it's not too late to contribute to this topic. We feel it's a case of better-late-than-never -- [especially on this Thursday before a long Easter weekend here in South Africa]. We really appreciate that Brian Dashew has made a comprehensive list of the recommendations and issues involved.
At Unisa, [Univ of South Africa], we use SAKAI 2.5.X and many of tools come standard with our course sites. We share many of the concerns that have been expressed in this discussion:
* Our academics and other staff (eg, Library) have a lot of trouble with the Wiki and don't use it. No matter how much training and examples we give, staff just don't make use of it.
* The other side of the coin is that our students also don't know how to use it. We are a distance education institution and have many constraints because of limited access to computers. Therefore, most of our students (and academics) have little or no experience with wikis and other internet-based tools (SAKAI or otherwise) or functions that require lots of bandwidth.
* We don't seem to have these problems with other tools, such as Blogger, Announcements, etc where staff members find SAKAI tools quite simple to use and try things out on their own, without additional training necessary.
* We feel that the Wiki could make a unique contribution for our distance education situation because of the potential for collaborative and group work -- a real need for us.
* Therefore, a simpler, more user-friendly Wiki solution with WYSIWYG editing would be great! Of course, we would like all the other things Brian has mentioned, too...
Alice Goodwin-Davey
Directorate: Curriculum & Learning Development
Unisa, Univ of South Africa
office: TvW 4-67
tel: 012-429-6701
email: goodwaa at unisa.ac.za
From: pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Brian Dashew
Sent: 06 April 2009 07:29 PM
To: pedagogy Learning; Sakai UX
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Wiki's and Sakai
Hello:
I've been reading these Wiki emails with a great deal of interest. At Marist, we run a 'special topics' workshop on how to use the wiki, both from a technical and pedagogical perspective. I've only been here a short time, but the wiki workshops have been the most well attended and well received of those I have run, which says to me that a) there is certainly a great deal of interest in a wiki that is integrated into the Sakai toolbase and b) with a little bit of training (our workshop is approximately two hours long), faculty can overcome the learning curve in using wiki markup. Having said that, I can certainly see the benefits of some of the upgrades suggested, but we do not have the programming resources to throw behind a solution, so we are flexing to the capabilities of the tool.
All that is a prelude to my suggestion to move the conversation about a stopgap measure to an investigation of upgrades necessary for the Sakai wiki to be widely accepted as THE wiki solution for institutions using Sakai (i.e., if we need a more robust, user-friendly wiki, what does that entail? and does that description necessitate one of the interim solutions that has been proposed?). I think if we can target necessary upgrades, there will be more clarity in decisions about how to proceed (integrating/waiting for Sakai 3 authoring capabilities, seeking to integrate an existing wiki, making specific updates to the existing wiki?).
I've been through the emails and I've tried to cull the various wiki requirements (some of which are being met by the current wiki; some of which are not).
- Simple versioning/roll back [yes]
- WYSIWYG (or FCKEditor?) [no]
- Easy page generation/linking [yes]
- Group awareness [no]
- Role awareness [moderate]
- Defined UX to separate wiki use of authoring from content management of authoring [no]
- Import/export existing format [to word/pdf, but not to another wiki]
- Copy/paste from word [not while maintaining styles]
- Searching [no]
- Archiving [no]
- Tagging [no]
- Gradebook integration [no, but evidently easy to achieve?]
- Ease of creating tables/grids/graphic organizers [moderate]
- Compatibility (or visibility) of terms of service [if we use external product only]
- Ease of integration with Sakai (two way) [if we use external product]
I think it probably makes sense for this to live on Confluence as it's being discussed but I don't have editing rights on the wiki tool space. I suggest we answer the following questions:
- Is that list of 15 items comprehensive? [if not, let's add to it]
- For each functionality listed: does this functionality currently exist [I have tried to do that in brackets above]? If not, how difficult would it be to implement?
- For each functionality listed: how necessary is this functionality to users being able to implement wiki activities in their classes?
Does this process seem like the appropriate way to start drawing some conclusions?
Thank you,
Brian
---------------------
Brian Dashew
Instructional Designer, Academic Technology & eLearning
Marist College
Library 317
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
(845) 575-3303
Email: Brian.Dashew at marist.edu<mailto:Brian.Dashew at marist.edu>
From:
"Christopher D. Coppola" <chris.coppola at rsmart.com>
To:
Michael Korcuska <mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org>
Cc:
pedagogy Learning <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, Sakai UX <sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Date:
04/06/2009 11:20 AM
Subject:
Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Wiki's and Sakai
________________________________
I agree that the ideal path is a core capability and perhaps backporting is an option. I was just thinking perhaps as a 2.x stopgap integration might be worth cosidering. I'm not in favor of it or against it... I was just throwing out the idea.
Google docs integration is probably valuable in either case. I've become less of a fan of Confluence for non-technical users.
/chris
--
rSmart
Chris Coppola | 602.490.0472
blog: coppola.rsmart.com<http://coppola.rsmart.com/>
On Apr 6, 2009, at 2:18 AM, Michael Korcuska wrote:
I guess I'd much rather see the work that is already happening in "3akai" on content authoring be back-ported to 2.x. This keeps everyone in Sakai working with similar technology and potentially sets a much easier transition path from 2.x to 3.0 for users.
And if someone wanted to pursue the integration path wouldn't Google docs or Confluence be more appealing?
Michael
On Apr 3, 2009, at 21:56, Christopher D. Coppola wrote:
Interesting conversation. Nate Angell and I were talking about this the other day and agree that these are the desirable characteristics. There's a screen cast of a product called Mindtouch Deki that I think demonstrates these essential elements. They stay away from calling their product (which is open source) a wiki. It doesn't use wiki text, it uses standards compliant xhtml. Check out the screencast: http://www.mindtouch.com/
Another potential solution at least for the 2.x branch that we've been talking about is to integrate with an existing product like this. Anyone else thinking about that?
/chris
--
rSmart
Chris Coppola | 602.490.0472
blog: coppola.rsmart.com<http://coppola.rsmart.com/>
On Apr 3, 2009, at 12:07 PM, John Ansorge wrote:
I completely agree that the Sakai 3 content authoring shows great promise and it would be great to see a little bit of that functionality function in 2.x.
While wiki syntax can be useful, I think for most student and faculty needs WYSIWYG is far more desirable. I think what most of our instructors/students are looking for in the wiki is this:
* simple versioning/rollback
* WYSIWYG
* easy page generation and page linking
* basic level of access control (group-aware would be great, but role-based is ok, too)
That's enough to allow group collaboration on a project in the wiki tool without needing to know wiki markup. The current wiki is close, but I don't think we should underestimate the learning curve that wiki-markup presents for many users. It's really easy for a typo or small formatting mistake to mess up an entire page when we leave it to humans to generate markup code.
John Norman wrote:
FWIW we see the content authoring solution planned for Sakai 3 as
combining the best of both worlds for site creation and wiki pages. We
haven't quite figured out what the UX should be to separate out 'wiki'
use of authoring (i.e. students can edit pages) from 'content
management' use of authoring (site owners - faculty - can edit pages),
but the technology is there.
So there are (at least) two options for a collaborative project:
1. Fix up the nearly done work that exists (should be a small task)
2. Introduce the content authoring paradigm into the Sakai 2 roadmap.
Mostly working, a step towards Sakai 3, but with a larger QA load and
requiring JCR to be active in the deployment.
Michael's Sakai 3 demo (running on Sakai 2.5/K1) shows what this
intermediate solution might look like (focus on the 'create new web
page' parts and imagine you give your students permission to do this).
There would almost certainly need to be some UX work to make this work
well for a combined 'content management' and 'wiki' scenario.
John
On 2 Apr 2009, at 01:37, Hardman, Gloria wrote:
Hello all
Our faculty have generally found the Wiki too difficult as well. A
few have done wonders with it and their students participated with
enthusiasm. For most, it is too much effort to figure it all out.
For those who have used more user-friendly Wiki software it is hard
to understand why we can't offer a more user-friendly solution.
We were also hoping for a better editor in 2.6.
All the best
Gloria
On 4/1/09 4:59 PM, "May, Megan Marie" <mmmay at indiana.edu><mailto:mmmay at indiana.edu> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Here at IU we're disappointed that the WYSIWYG editing capabilities
aren't going to make the 2.6.0 release (see message below for the
announcement/rationale). We've found that faculty try the wiki
in Sakai but end up switching to free and inexpensive hosted
solutions because they are so much easier to use. Obviously, the
wysiwyg would greatly improve the user experience but it wouldn't
resolve the 'ease of use' issues we're hearing about. This has made
us wonder if it might be wise to explore other options, like
integration with existing wiki applications.
Do other institutions receive similar feedback? Has anyone looked
into integrating Sakai with a different wiki solution?
Thanks,
Megan
From: Pete Peterson [mailto:plpeterson at ucdavis.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:45 PM
To: 'Sakai Developers'; 'Sakai QA'; production at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:production at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Cc: Michael Korcuska; Knoop, Peter; Anthony Whyte; Pete Peterson;
May, Megan Marie; Stephen Swinsburg; David Horwitz
Subject: Important information about Sakai 2.6.0 and the rWiki tool
Greetings Sakai Community,
We have been unable to resolve a number of issues with the 2.6 rwiki
code, centered around the WYSIWYG editing capabilities and data loss
under certain conditions. At this point in the release cycle we are
opting to replace it with the 2.5.x version of rwiki, making the
necessary changes to make it compatible with the 2.6 codebase. We
are also re-applying some of the minor fixes and improvements
intended for the 2.6 version of rwiki to the 2.5.x-based version
(see SAK-15866 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
for more details).
Summary
* We have rolled the rwiki code back to the 2.5 version which
has proven stable in many production instances.
* Many of the updated rwiki features that are present in
trunk/ the original 2.6 version, have been merged back into this
version. Details of this effort can be viewed at SAK-15866 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
<http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866> (many thanks
to Steve Swinsburg for his work on this issue).
* This new hybrid-rwiki has been tested and seems to work as
expected.
With regards to the WYSIWYG editing capabilities for rwiki scheduled
for inclusion in Sakai 2.6 (SAK-8535 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535
<http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535> ), we will
continue explore options for implementing such functionality at a
later time. This is an oft requested features, so if you are
interested in helping us explore and implement possible solutions,
please contact Peter Knoop <mailto:knoop at umich.edu><mailto:knoop at umich.edu><mailto:knoop at umich.edu
, Sakai Project Coordinator.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please send them
to us by 3/31/2009.
Thank you for your time and support,
Pete Peterson
QA Director, Sakai Foundation
plpeterson at ucdavis.edu<mailto:plpeterson at ucdavis.edu>
Phone: +1-530-754-7259
From: Pete Peterson [mailto:plpeterson at ucdavis.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:45 PM
To: 'Sakai Developers'; 'Sakai QA'; production at collab.sakaiproject.org
Cc: Michael Korcuska; Knoop, Peter; Anthony Whyte; Pete Peterson; May, Megan Marie; Stephen Swinsburg; David Horwitz
Subject: Important information about Sakai 2.6.0 and the rWiki tool
Greetings Sakai Community,
We have been unable to resolve a number of issues with the 2.6 rwiki code, centered around the WYSIWYG editing capabilities and data loss under certain conditions. At this point in the release cycle we are opting to replace it with the 2.5.x version of rwiki, making the necessary changes to make it compatible with the 2.6 codebase. We are also re-applying some of the minor fixes and improvements intended for the 2.6 version of rwiki to the 2.5.x-based version (see SAK-15866 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866> for more details).
Summary
* We have rolled the rwiki code back to the 2.5 version which has proven stable in many production instances.
* Many of the updated rwiki features that are present in trunk/ the original 2.6 version, have been merged back into this version. Details of this effort can be viewed at SAK-15866 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866> (many thanks to Steve Swinsburg for his work on this issue).
* This new hybrid-rwiki has been tested and seems to work as expected.
With regards to the WYSIWYG editing capabilities for rwiki scheduled for inclusion in Sakai 2.6 (SAK-8535 <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535><http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535> ), we will continue explore options for implementing such functionality at a later time. This is an oft requested features, so if you are interested in helping us explore and implement possible solutions, please contact Peter Knoop <mailto:knoop at umich.edu><mailto:knoop at umich.edu> , Sakai Project Coordinator.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please send them to us by 3/31/2009.
Thank you for your time and support,
Pete Peterson
QA Director, Sakai Foundation
plpeterson at ucdavis.edu
Phone: +1-530-754-7259
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