Hi Matt:
I have given some thought to your request here and earlier in another topic of forum about using wiki to work with your students. I have surfing wikis for about 9 years now having started at the first wiki http://c2.com created by Ward Cunningham and with Ward's hosting, thank you Ward, maintained an experimental wiki http://c2.com:8000 for lawyers and accountants. On Ward's wiki the concept of categories was developed. This is the concept that I will build on here.
Wiki is totally open ended and unstructured. Hopefully there may some ways to have the benefit of the lack of structure yet maintain some order. In this message I am going to suggest a few: how to harnessing the power of wiki to create a self-organizing index of the contents for a course or project, how use personal pages that work like Moodle journals and other pages that work like the Moodle glossary.
I have one tip to tame the wiki and the chaos of every which way hyper linking of pages. The notion involves key words to identify the content or purpose of the various types or sets of pages. Rather than having all of the participants work on one page, increasing the risk of over writing their work when two or more are working in the wiki at the same time, what would have been a single page for all of the participants can become a set of similar pages one for each participant or group into which the course or project has been organized. This would make it easier to separately evaluate the contribution or each participant or group.
As a starter each participant would initially create a page for themselves with their own name, like MattMolly, and talk about themselves. And then that page can function a bit like a journal linking the other pages that the participant creates through the course or project. This would make it super handy for a review and comment on the work of the student. When individuals contribute to a page other than there personal page they can sign their contribution with their wiki name which in turn links to their home page. Perhaps the convention should be name and date like MattMalloy (March 7, 2005). Also when clicking on the title of the participants PersonalPage all of the pages to which they have contributed will be listed. This also assists review of the participant's work.
The other pages to be created as the participants work their way through the course or project, one created by each participant or group, need to have names that will distinguish one from another. Perhaps there needs to be a naming convention to avoid chaos.
There is a system particularly suited to wiki using the key word or words assigned to each page in the set of other pages that each participant or group creates. So for example, the personal pages may be assigned the key word Personal or PersonalPage. At the foot of the page the page creator as part of his or her assignment to create a PersonalPage enters the wiki words CategoryPersonalPage.
The page CategoryPersonalPage should describe the category of page and its function in the course or project. A list of all of the CategoryPersonalPages can be displayed by clicking on the title of the CategroyPersonalPage page (or in the mini-tool-bar above the title of the page click on the "Links" button for the same listing). This could be the last bit of text on the CategoryPersonalPage page reminding the reader that he or she can get a list of the PersonalPage that it turned can be used to navigate to those pages.
This greatly facilitates navigation among pages in a particular category by participants and the course instructor or project coordinator. This to should also help in review of the work of the participants.
The the last piece is that each of the CategoryPage pages are similarly coordinated. Each CategoryPage has at that foot of that page the wiki words CategoryPage. On the CategoryPage itself the purpose of the CategoryPage pages is explained. Clicking on the title of that page produces a list of the various CategoryPage pages.
Words and phrases that are important to the course or project can be similarly defined in a series of page named with the word or phrase defined. This group of pages can be assigned to a category called CategoryDefinition. When a student adds to a page that is a definition or other page that is the product of the collective effort of all of the participants that should be noted by them with the wiki name of the page on their personal page which is serving as a journal.
I am inclined to use a page naming convention that prefers the singular over the plural thus CategoryPersonalPage rather than CategoryPersonalPages. Then when referring to a single personal page the reference can be PersonalPage of MattMalloy. When one needs to refer to plural pages then the convention can be to use PersonalPage|s which preserves PersoanlPage as a link to the category page for PersonalPage|s. Without the insertion of the pipe | the reference to PersonalPages would lead to the creation of a page called PersonalPages which would add a bit of confusion.
These concepts can be introduced with the personal page rather than including them in the pre-wiki orientation. There is a lot here which is probably best taught learn by following rather than in a narrative like I have just laid on you here.
There is another place that I should post this in reply to another query a bit like yours about using wiki. If there are some points in the foregoing that are confusing or, let's me face it, poorly scripted, please help me out.
John
