[Building Sakai] Rwiki

[Sean Keesler]

One of the real powers of wiki's for teaching is the ability to stub out
ideas and create links to non-existent pages. The result is an invitation to
extend and flesh out the rough ideas. Wiki syntax isn't particularly
important...but the idea that you can easily state an area you, you peers,
or your students need to come back to and address later without interrupting
the flow of ideas IS. A traditional google doc approach doesn't really
capture that important functionality (unless I don't use it right ;).

I can't help but but notice that many of the TWSIA uses of wikis involved
student "exploration" and "constructionist" uses that probably exploited the
ability of a wiki to facilitate organic growth and exploration of
interesting areas of student learning.

Sean



On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Clay Fenlason <khomotso at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's an interesting idea to me - because as a reader of user surveys
> and faculty feedback I find it so counterintuitive - that there might
> be a clamor for wiki markup after we eliminate the need.  We've heard
> so many complaints not only about the obscurity of the markup, but
> also the *dialect* of choice, that I've assumed any loss negligible.
>
> On the other hand, I know that I myself often short-circuit WYSIWYG
> mode in Confluence (and elsewhere) so that I can more precisely
> control formatting, e.g. because the WYSIWYG mode is too clumsy to
> recognize that I want to close the </b> tag before typing in the next
> word, etc. Will a WYSIWYG mode ever be good enough to remove this
> need? I hope we can come closer.
>
> I'm not certain that this is the case, but I think the path of least
> resistance for a wiki-like tool based on the TinyMCE content authoring
> code ( already exhibited at http://3akai.sakaiproject.org ) might rely
> upon the versioning native to JCR rather than its own business logic,
> in which case the 2 to 3 transition might be smoothed not only as a
> matter of the UX, but also the underlying data migration.
>
> ~Clay
>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Charlie
> Macchia<cmacchia at brainovision.com> wrote:
> > Hi John, let me know if I've got this right.
> >
> > Are you saying: rather than try to integrate a better WYSIWYG editor on
> top
> > of the current rWiki, instead create a separate wiki like tool, that uses
> > tinyMCE as the front end, but isn't strict wiki syntax, yet still
> maintains
> > things like history, versions, alerts etc.
> >
> > Aside from getting into the plusses and minuses - do I have this right?
> >
> > Charlie
> >
> > On 7/17/09 8:18 AM, "John Norman" <john at caret.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> A slightly different tack to consider (posted as an individual and
> >> early adopter of wiki) is that the use cases where WYSIWYG is
> >> important will be handled by TinyMCE-based page authoring in Sakai 3.
> >> However, we don't yet know whether there will be residual demand for
> >> "pure" wiki functionality (i.e. using wiki syntax). Perhaps a good way
> >> forward might be to consider introducing the page authoring approach
> >> in the "content authoring on Sakai 2" demo (
> http://3akai.sakaiproject.org/dev/
> >>   for now) as an *additional* new tool within Sakai 2. The way the
> >> technology is presented to users might need to be changed, but in
> >> principle it would allow flexible page authoring and conventional wiki
> >> to exist side by side and to be used according to the use case/
> >> requirements.
> >>
> >> An advantage of this approach would be smoothing the path from 2 to 3.
> >>
> >> Cambridge could support such an effort with advice and guidance, but
> >> would not be able to commit the resource to make it happen.
> >>
> >> John
> >>
> >> On 17 Jul 2009, at 11:48, Adam Marshall wrote:
> >
> > --
> >
> >
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>
>
> --
> Clay Fenlason
> Director, Educational Technology
> Georgia Institute of Technology
> (404) 385-6644
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