wikiwiki

[Andy Turner]

Was it ever considered to have one of these and develop it? Personally, I’ve found wiki’s very useful, but I appreciate there can be problems with them. My suggestion would be a semantic MediaWiki http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ instance.

[Martin Hawksey]

we did talk about it. The issue we wrestled with was the balance between course and participant created spaces. We were trying to stick to the connectivist philosophy, the Downes quote “the users are assumed to be outside the system for the most part, inhabiting their own spaces, and not mine” was particularly at the forefront of my mind.

We were aware that not all participants would have their own spaces which is why we included the forums. We have been and continue to encourage participants to create other spaces. When we are told about these or find them where possible we add activity feeds to the Course Reader to promote further clustering.

[David Jennings]

Andy, sorry this question went so long without an answer. Thanks to Martin for the initial response (and thus prodding me). Everything Martin says is correct. Just to add that another consideration was the attritional impact of requiring people (a) to register for another login (because we didn’t think we could intergrate MediaWiki within WordPress) and (b) to learn the wiki ropes if they don’t already know them. We thought only a small minority of people would make it through these hoops.

Personally, I’d love to explore the potential of semantic MediaWiki with a community along the lines of ocTEL. I bet Martin would too. But we are a bit geeky, and ocTEL wants to be welcoming to non-geeks. Maybe we can find a compromise that streams the geek element without seeming exclusive of alienating to the majority in future iterations.  

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