Note: this post is about the OU wiki - that is NOT the same as the normal wiki in Moodle 1.9 - if you don't know what OU wiki is, then you don't have it, so please ignore this post.
GRRRRRR I wrote a really long post and lost it all because of that b*****d html editor.
Short version:
there is new ouwiki code in downloads from tomorrow now but DON'T UPDATE your real system as it is probably broken. We will put out a stable version in December like there already is for ForumNG and OU blog, wait for that. But, please feel free to try it out on test systems before then.
The big new feature is annotation which is intended to replace comments. Comments were a nice idea but didn't work with students - they put things in comments instead of editing the page as they should (either too timid or just didn't know which was appropriate), and it was also too complicated for them. So if you choose, you can get rid of 'em. Instead you can have annotation. Annotation lets the teacher add 'red pen' notes to a wiki page and lock it, so as to give feedback when marking a wiki page.
--sam
Hi Sam and everyone,
Do you mean to say, Sam, that there are html editors (?TinyMce) which don't time out and make you lose your posts?
I don't actually lose posts any more because I've installed Lazarus Form Recovery in Firefox.
Cheers,
Glenys
Do you mean to say, Sam, that there are html editors (?TinyMce) which don't time out and make you lose your posts?
I don't actually lose posts any more because I've installed Lazarus Form Recovery in Firefox.
Cheers,
Glenys
Is there a stable version that I can download somewhere which will run in Moodle v 1.9.9, now, while I wait for December? I can't find one other than the "use at own risk" version.
I was running OU wiki v 20081006 in Moodle v 1.9.2. Everything was fine.
Then we recently upgraded Moodle to v 1.9.9 and I got reports of OU wiki not acting properly from my users. So, I came to moodle.org and downloaded/upgraded OU wiki to v. 20100422 [I didn't notice the "use at own risk" warning in the version.php file in time (my fault)].
That completely made it unusable: both teachers & students get "permission denied" errors just trying to view it and there's no listing in the Permissions section at all for it to make any adjustments.
I can't revert back to the first version because it wasn't working correctly either.
Do I have any options?
Thanks.
I'm about to make (maybe today) the stable version ouwiki which will go into our december release - pending testing. I wasn't going to upload it anywhere until after the testing in December but since you ask, there's no reason I can't upload it as soon as I finish it. So if you can wait for that yes you have an option.
If you can identify a specific bug that is reproducible in general without needing access to your system (example: 'I made a fresh moodle install with ouwiki, created a new course CF101 with all default settings, created a user and added them as teacher on that course, added ouwiki on that course with all default settings, and logged in as the user - they get the following error message when they click on the ouwiki') and you add that to Moodle Tracker, then I'll fix it, so that's another option! It would probably be preferable to report this kind of problem against the stable release once it exists.
By the way the 'use at own risk' warning is not indicating a new worse situation. It's just making explicit the old/existing situation which is that if you grab a random release from that cvs, then it hasn't been tested.
--sam
Hi,
Today I have released new 'stable' versions of OU wiki and OU search (R2.1 in both cases). These are for use with standard Moodle 1.9.x.
I would not recommend that anyone upgrades to these now unless you are having problems with current version. Our testing cycle isn't complete. If you wait for December 7th and then get the latest version available (might be these or might be 2.something else), you'll then be running the same version as our live system.
You can get them by following the link to the google docs folder from the modules & plugins database entry.
Note that I briefly tested these features on current Moodle (1.9.10+) using MySQL (all our testing is with Postgres and occasionally there are glitches in MySQL as a result). I was able to create a wiki on a course and use a student account to edit the page, then search for something on it, so I think it's basically working.
When reporting bugs with OU wiki, please use the Moodle tracker and please include the stable version number that you are using (e.g. R2.1). You can find the stable version number by going to the module settings page from the admin screens.
--sam
Thanks it's a great tool!
Try to add a block called "file manager" to the course and have
the students upload documents (and images) into their own storage space
and then... ask them to link it into the Wiki.
Or...
Setup a public Database activity inside the course,
into which they can all upload anything (setup a form for that, obviously)
and then they can use this repository to link items into the right places inside the wiki.
We use both methods
Thank you very much! I will try that
Thanks for that answer Nadav
Just to confirm, at present there is no nice way to put attachments or images into OU wiki, so you do have to use an approach like that.
We are going to convert OU wiki to moodle 2 (at least I hope this works out - I have written a spec, but we will be outsourcing the actual work) and as part of that conversion, we are going to add support for images and attached files in wiki pages. So in Moodle 2 you won't have to mess around to get this working.
Of course, in Moodle 2, you might prefer to use the standard wiki rather than OU wiki as the standard one has been rewritten and hopefully won't be horribly buggy any more. We're still planning to use OU wiki here though.
--sam
That's helpful to hear Sam! We love the OU wiki and are planning to upgrade to Moodle 2 Summer 2010. Do you have a timescale for a Moodle2 version of the OUwiki?
You're already a bit behind that plan. I guess you mean 2011...
We will have a Moodle 2 version ouwiki by about March - but it won't be in wide scale use at the OU until about September 2011.
--sam
Hi Sam,
I was hoping you might be able to give an update on the status of OU Wiki for Moodle 2.0.
We've been using it in 1.9 and it meets our needs better than the standard wiki. I've been looking at the new Moodle 2.0 Wiki, and I would still prefer to use OU when we upgrade to 2.0 if it's available.
Thank you for your efforts!
-Lauren
Hi,
Thanks for using OU wiki.
I released an alpha version for Moodle 2 some time ago which you can find in my blog - scroll down to the 6 April entry.
You are welcome to use this version now but please be aware that it is an alpha version, in other words we have not yet fully tested it and it is not yet deployed with real students.
At a later date (probably some time in September) I will release a newer version that includes a few new minor features and more importantly, that has been tested and is in use on our live systems. With that version, you will be able to be more confident that we haven't broken something...
One note - at the OU we are not using the standard 'upgrade' process (we started a completely new Moodle 2 based system). Consequently we are unlikely to test this significantly in-house, even with the 'finished' version. Hopefully there will not be problems upgrading content but if you want to do that, you should definitely test first.
--sam
PS Just to make sure I don't claim credit where it isn't due: I did the design/planning for the conversion of OU wiki to VLE 2 and new features, but the actual development (except a few bugfixes) has all been outsourced.
Thank you for the quick reply, Sam! I will take a look at the alpha version. We have a Moodle 2.0 test site up that we can experiment on. We don't need to upgrade any content, so this should work fine for us.
So -- we've got OU Wiki installed on our Moodle 2.0 box. I love the annotate feature! We'd like to have students use this feature for peer review (we used to use commenting with OU Wiki for this purpose). I notice that it is very easy to give students permission to annotate (thank you!), but that they can only annotate wiki pages that they have access to edit.
Do you know if it would be possible to build in functionality which would allow students to annotate any wiki page that they can view (say visible groups that they are not a part of?)? Again -- the goal is peer review. We don't want them to be able to edit other groups' wikis, but we would like them to be able to annotate/comment. This is how the commenting feature used to work - students could comment on wikis that they could view but not edit.
I'm sure we can find some sort of workaround if this feature doesn't become available, but I imagine others might find it to be useful as well!
Thanks again for your time and for the development work your group supports!
I would second this as an essential feature. Been looking at how to set it up but not possible without editing and not simple without overriding other things.
One idea would be to have the same interface but differentiating between teacher / editing 'annotations' and offering the same system under the guise of 'in-line comments' which are available only with view rights. Don't know if that would make it easier to develop but might be.
Steve
Any updates on the new version of OU Wiki for Moodle 2.0?
I hadn't seen that! Thank you!
For the conveniece of other readers... The link has information about a beta of OU Wiki for Moodle 2.0 that was released in early September and indicates that a release-quality version should be released sometime after mid-October. Yay!
Sam -- I was trying to find something about downloading whole wikis from Moodle (came up empty) and came across this posting about OUWiki, which I'll probably be interested in . . . but noticed that you refer to "comments" on the existing wiki. I don't seem able to find anything about that, in Moodle docs or the local help system. Where should I be looking? -- Russ
I don't think the standard Moodle wiki ever had comments. Maybe some confusion about wording.
OU wiki had comments - until we turned them off because we found they were a bad idea for usability. Actually they are still present in current releases (there is a site + per-wiki option for whether they are allowed or not), but we will be removing them from our 2.0 version. I think I made them default to off on new installs.
Our favoured alternative is the new 'annotation' feature which is specifically designed for tutors to leave 'red pen' type comments when marking work done in the wiki. But if students want to discuss the wiki, we're expecting them to do so out of band using forums or chat.
Basically this is part of the raison d'etre of ouwiki which is a wiki that's designed specifically for use in teaching - rather than to compete with MediaWiki as a general wiki. Also unlike MediaWiki it's generally part of a course website that has other facilities for general communication.
The specific problem with comments was that students weren't sure when they should use comments rather than editing the wiki. It caused problems especially for timid students who tended to just leave comments when the point of a wiki is that they should jump in and change it. In addition the comment interface wasn't very useful for the 'marking' case described above, which turned out to be the most important one for our users... And you couldn't subscribe to comments, for example, so forums are a much more reliable way of holding discussions.
--sam
Thanks, Sam; I guess I misread that post -- I was hoping there was some way to put comments on a wiki page on the standard wiki. I'm trying to help groups of students in my class repurpose their wikis for public consumption, and it would be helpful. What I've been doing is adding comments in color and saying, remove the comments when you've read and responded to them -- but the reluctance to make any real changes is, as you say, pretty deep-seated. They don't even like to delete the green comments.
The problem I have with forums is that it's so difficult to pin them to specific chunks of text in the wiki -- e.g., you want to say that a reference needs to be reformatted or a sentence revised, and you wind up copying the whole works into the forum.
I'll be interested to see OUWiki -- but I guess I'll put it off till 2.0 comes out and we adopt it here.
Sam -
Is the new version of Wiki going to be able to publish?, i.e. be able to display all of the pages without having all the Preview and Editing stuff. In other words, a link in the module that will run the wiki like an HTML page?
I know you can export to HTML through the export zip file feature, but I would like my students to "publish" internally in order to present their ideas at the end of class.
If this is already in place somewhere else, I haven't been able to find it.
Regards,
Bob
Hi Sam,
This just a request for clarification initially. We are using annotations for peer review. However, we had an issue recently and found that we were not able to track changes to annotations using the history links.
Are annotations excluded from the changes in the history or are we missing something?
Thanks,
Amanda
Hello, please can you tell me the meaning of ou wiki? I try to know what new features is the new WIKI in moodle 2.3, please can you help me to know more of wiki in Moodle 2.3