Category Archives: Instructional Technology

Instructional Technology

Tricky-Wiki

Why is it so hard to find an appropriate wiki?

 Good question… I’m not sure I can answer that on my own. I’ll admit that I have a set of features that I’m not willing to do without. There’s also a general lack of consistency across wiki tools, which make it hard to compare.

I have actually become a HUGE wiki user in the last year or so, tracking all sorts of projects and investigations on a wiki. Some are on my private wiki, that only I (and a few sys admins!) can see. Some have been posted to one of my group wikis, so my colleagues can possibly benefit from the things I’ve discovered. (FYI: I’m currently using a wiki tool called Confluence, which is a fairly "techie" wiki tool, and may or may not be exactly what we need for our wider University community). 

 What is a wiki?

At its core, a wiki is a collaborative document. Users can all edit the document, and work on it together. Their changes are tracked, so that the different versions of the document can be compared. At the end, there can be a cohesive product document that everyone worked on, without having to be in the same room together!

What can a wiki be?

Another good question. I think we’re still working on this one. It can be a collection of documents that track the progress of a project — or, the documents could BE the project. Wikis are great for evolving projects, where the information needs to be updated at different times, by different people involved. Wikis are great for growing concepts from different viewpoints. In education, wikis are often used for groupwork, for the development of the class materials by various instructors & assistants, for research projects, etc.

What features are important in a wiki?

Here are some of the things that I’m looking for:

 

  • Page hierarchy, so people can build a navigable collection of wiki documents. Since wiki pages aren’t physical, there doesn’t need to be a strict folder structure — just a nice user interface that allows the user to contextualize what they’re doing.
  • Easy to understand navigation of the content you’ve built!! I like tree structures and breadcrumbs (the list of links at the top of the page that link back to the outer layers of sections — you know, like an onion, and therefore Shrek), but they aren’t the only way to go.
  • The ability to easily embed various media types: quicktime movies, windows media, flash, audio files, youtube clips, etc.
  • An easy to use rich-text editor for editing text and embedding things (links, attachments, media, images, etc.) AS WELL as the ability to edit the code (not sure if I require wiki markup, or if I’m OK with HTML — the concept of HTML code for a wiki baffles me a little, but I think I can be cool with it).
  • The ability for a wiki administrator (not just the system administrator) to manage who has access to the wiki, and to what extent. Is it totally closed to the public? Is it viewable by the public, but only editable by a select group of users? That choice is important!
  • The ability for us to host our own server, mostly due to confidentiality issues, but also so that we can have things like authentication using our current my.ryerson accounts and the possibility of creating enrollment-based groups.
  • Auto-saving of documents while a user is working on them. I don’t know how many times I’ve been working on something, just to be kicked out of a system when I click the Submit button and having to re-do EVERYTHING because there was no auto-save.
  • An easy way for users to link to: other pages in the wiki, webpages, users’ email addresses, etc.
  • Change tracking and version comparison.

The key thing, for ALL of these features is that they need to be EASY to use, and ‘not too techie’. 

So, tell me… are these the same things you look for in a wiki? I’m not even sure anyone reads my posts, since I’ve never gotten a reply to my questions sent through the ether. Just like with the blog investigation, input is always welcome – whether you agree with my wish list or not!!

Always wikilicious,

S

Instructional Technology

The New Wave?

 Google Wave Screenshot - from wave.google.com
Google Wave Screenshot – from wave.google.com

The other day, Google previewed a new product that is *still in development* called "Google Wave". It will be available for use later this year, but if it’s anything like the preview, we are in for a revolution! Does this sound like an exaggeration? It’s not really… the demo totally blew my mind!!

WARNING: THIS IS A REALLY LONG POST. I’M ALMOST SORRY.

To give an overview, before getting into the details, Google Wave attempts to combine the following tools into one single application: email, group discussion, instant messaging, document collaboration, and more! As the developers admitted, it does some things that they themselves hadn’t envisioned (as no tool had offered these abilities before). No, I don’t mean that each of these separate tools are available within Wave — I mean that the concept of the Wave itself (product name, as well as what they call the document that is created) meshes all of these abilities into a single "thing".

A tool like this would offer users the ability to communicate ideas in a non-linear fashion (as opposed to the long string of email replies you see at the end of a discussion), in a way that can be reviewed live or after the fact. Participants can be added at any time, and have the ability to review not only the current state of the document/communication (from here on, simply referred to as ‘the Wave’), but can also use a Playback feature to review every state of the Wave, in order.

Whether it is a collaborative document, or an ongoing communication really doesn’t depend on the tool itself – simply how the participants are using it.

So what does this mean for education? Off the top, it would offer the features that students and teachers are already using (in some schools), in a single tool. The Wave created by a class group could be kept private – or it could be posted to something like a class blog or website, for the public to view. It doesn’t seem that the developers have really considered the possible impact on education, so new uses will likely emerge as those of us in education get our hands on it. For those of you concerned about the Patriot act and users’ confidential information — apparently, self-hosting will be a possibility. I’m not sure if it will be available right away, or how much work would be required to host it… but it gives us some hope!

In any case, my notes during the session, as well as the session video, are posted below.

Here is a good breakdown of Google Wave, in case my notes and blathering have left you more confused.

 

Demoed in Chrome and Safari. Dancing and neener neener…

HTML 5 application

What would email look like if it was invented today?

Gmail combines emails into threads

Wave thinks of the conversation as a shared object, building from a central server. More like a discussion board, than email. Hosted conversation. Can split a message apart, to post responses to specific parts of a message. Can do instant messaging conversing… transmitting live almost character by character (could be dangerous, since it doesn’t give the user a chance to change their mind about sending a post! — ah, they’ve added a checkbox to disable this, if you aren’t comfortable with it.)

 Can add new participants to a conversation at any time. With email, you’d have to make sure the whole conversation is in the reply structure. With this, they just see the whole thing intact. Playback allows you to see the progress of the discussion, from the original *intact* message, and all subsequent additions in the order they were added.

Private reply – Can reply to some recipients, while hiding it from others in the conversation. The tree structure allows you to restrict access to any "branch" of the tree.

Attachments – Drag & drop attachments (photos, etc.) onto the "wave". Image thumbnails appear to the participants even before the full-sized image is completely uploaded to the server. This part currently requires a downloaded plugin (gears?), as it’s not currently part of HTML 5 – but a proposal has been made to add it to HTML 5.

Can essentially create a group photo album, complete with a viewer.

APIs – allow you to embed waves on your webpage.

Example – Embed in Blogger blog – add blog user (bloggy?) to the wave,  and it will be embedded and usable from within the blog. Can respond to the wave from inside the blog itself.
Example – Embed in Orkut? Can embed, can use contacts other than your Wave contacts (she used her Orkut ones).

Waves on mobile devices – shown on an Android device, and an iPhone.

Editing & Document Collaboration – one central copy of the Wave… if you edit anything (i.e. captions on the photos), it will fix in all places it is being displayed/embedded. Not only can you edit your own messages, but you can edit each others’ messages – making Wave a great collaborative tool (instead of needing a wiki). Users who have *already seen the Wave* will see markup to identify the changes users have made, with a message about who made the changes. Playback can also be used to see the progress of the changes. The product of the Wave can be reused in another Wave or possibly exported.

Live, concurrent, editing – Multiple users can edit the same Wave at the same time. You can see the parts that they are changing, and a coloured icon showing where the person is editing. 

Wave Organizing – can use folders, tags, and can even link Waves inside other Waves. 

Are planning to add in features for spreadsheets and other types of document…

Extensions & Robots:

Spell-check – not only checks for spelling, but checks for the context of a word. Example: "been soup" – Waves suggests the word "bean" instead. Also, "icland is an icland" was *automatically* changed to "Iceland is an island.".

Youtube – the link-detection robot can also offer other options for a
Youtube link, including the ability to embed the video in the Wave.

Google search – can be done right inside Wave, and the resulting links or images can easily be added to the Wave. 

Forms – can be used to create forms collaboratively. There are two Wave stages here – the first wave is the Admin wave, used to create the form and collect the results. The second is the resulting form Wave itself, which is sent out to recipients who complete the form. (can be a poll, etc.)

Twitter – the "Tweety" extension allows you to create a ‘Twave", in which you log into Twitter and can update with a Tweet, view the list of updates from those you are following, and actually search Twitter based on keywords. Not only do you see these elements in Wave itself, the updates DO get sent to Twitter.

Rosie Robot — translates what is being typed in the Wave from
one language to another, based on the language settings of the user.
Example: An English user communicating with a French one — types in
English, translates to French on the other user’s screen. The French
user replies in French, which gets translated to English (word-by-word,
phrase-by-phrase) on the English user’s screen. Crazy cool! But how
good is the translation – we’ve all seen really bad translation tools!!!

Gadgets: 

Yes/No/Maybe

Games, like Sudoku and Chess 

 … and Playback works with Gadgets too!

Maps – can embed a map, find a location, change views, zoom in/out, make changes *collaboratively*!

Federation: users can build their own Wave system, give accounts, and the content should still work across Wave systems. (could this work for a Ryerson-based system?). They are planning to open source most of the code, so the alternate systems can look pretty much the same as the central Google Wave system. Even though users may technically be on separate Wave systems, the updates are still done real time.  (Even showed another Wave running inside terminal and looks really super geeky!)

Waves that are not shared with external users will only reside inside the "server closet", and will never be on the Google servers.

— In case you want to watch the whole preview:

Can’t See the embedded video? Click here.

Events, Instructional Technology

The Twit-xperiment: OUCC

Some OUCC tweets
A sample of the OUCC Tweets

I’ve already shamefully admitted that I’m late to the Twitter game, and like grade school, I’m the last to be picked for a team.

This week presented me with an opportunity to experiment with a task that other Twits have been doing for a while now – Tweeting an event.

I had already found some good examples — I recently went to a music festival, and searched Twitter after the fact for Tweets from the attendees. What I found was a collection of Tweets that journalled the entire event. People posted before the event, letting others know they’d be there, and trying to arrange a meet-up. People posted when they got there, about Montreal, about the places they stayed and the things they ate. Of course, people posted from the event – about the bands, the venue, the vendors and the “Industrial Burgers”.

After seeing this, I thought I might give it a go with OUCC. I managed to find someone on Twitter who was planning to go, and as it turns out we were really the only people Tweeting OUCC!! Hahaha… That said, you don’t need lots of people to successfully Tweet an event. There were people who couldn’t make the event watching the Tweets and sometimes even commenting back. We covered the essential points, and concisely as possible. I thought the end result was pretty interesting.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23oucc

OK, now to the specifics. I started by using an iPod Touch to Tweet on the first morning. It has a pretty decent Twitter application (TwitterFon), and it uses a WIFI connection. This worked well in the actual sessions (the Keynotes in AMC, the sessions in TRSM all use the Ryerson WIFI). This didn’t work out AT ALL at the dinners, or in the movie. It would have worked with an iPhone or Blackberry, however. I also found that the iPod touch was a little tricky to type on, so my tweets took a long time and had to be kept pretty short. That meant that I wasn’t putting the speaker’s name in a quote… just took too long, and I’d be missing the next thing they said. I also ran out of battery power half-way through the day.

After lunch on the first day, I switched to a laptop. I found it to be MUCH easier to use for entering text, and add to that the ability to copy & paste, and my tweets suddenly had more context. This also meant that I could quickly find websites that were mentioned in some of the sessions and include them in my tweets, for later reference. The downside of a laptop? They’re bigger to lug around (I didn’t have a NetBook, so…), they’re more distracting to other attendees, and they can get pretty hot on your lap.

I think a small “NetBook” style computer might be a good option for this kind of thing. I don’t know how great they are for battery life, but they’re smaller yet still full-featured.

One of the best experiences I had during this was a request from “the other OUCC Twit” to ask a question of a panel that I was attending. He chose to go to another session, but was still able to get info about the session I attended. Sure – you can do the same thing with instant messaging – but this way, the information is given to ANYONE who may be following us.

This is the essence of Twitter, I think. You don’t need to join a specific discussion forum or topic-based website to find a community discussing certain things. You just need to be smart about your searches. If you’re Tweeting an event, or something that may have a specific topic, add a pound sign to a string and try to get people to include it in their Tweets.

It’s not just about broadcasting your every move – although that’s how some people use it. It’s about finding connections with other users through topics, creating your own little community through the people and topics  you follow, and creating a context on a system that appears to have none. Pretty interesting.

Yikes – that was a long post. I definitely went over my 140 character limit.