Archive for January, 2007

http://www.mediawiki.org

A lot of my students are using WikiPedia as a resource.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but many of them do not understand exactly why it could be problematic.  I feel the best way to understand how a Wiki works is to use one.

Instead of polluting a wonderful resource like WikiPedia, I decided to setup my own wiki to use with my students.  I already have a Moodle server with a wiki, but I wanted a stand alone version.  I consulted the OpenSourceCMS – CMS Ratings list and found that MediaWiki with high ratings.

MediaWiki uses PHP and MySQL.  There was no prep as the install script setup the database and populated all the tables.  I found a nice installation resource:

http://devpit.org/wiki/Installing_Mediawiki

that helped with a couple of problems I encountered.  The main problem with the default installation is that anyone (including anonymous users) can create or edit entries.  I wanted to require users to login before doing these things.  In defense of MediaWiki’s defaults, it does give IP address tracking for anonymous users.  But for my class, I wanted to be able to easily determine who has created or edited each entry.

I gave everyone a copy of WikiPedia’s Cheatsheet for editing.  We are creating a wiki that covers copyright and all its implications on education.  There isn’t a lot of formatting required, but everyone does have to insert links to external resoures.  At this point, we are about half way through the project.  It seems to be going well.  I’ll post a followup when we finish.  It could be interesting.

http://scuttle.org/

Everyone has heard of del.icio.us.  I use it to keep track of my bookmarks that I want to share with other people.  But what if I could have my own del.icio.us server?  Then I could do projects with groups of people and all the tags we create would be limited to the people in our group.

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, go to del.icio.us and search for the tag: flash.  You’ll get more than 182,000 links.  Many of those links will connect to pages with information about Macromedia Flash, but there will be plenty of other things to sift through: flash drives, flash bulbs, flash arrests…

More importantly, most of them will not deal with Flash items that can be used in an educational environment.

I want to have a site where my students can go and enter URLs for sites that have educational multimedia activities.  I want my students to put in tags that relate to these sites: arithmetic, chemistry, elementary reading, etc.  I don’t want all this work to “disappear” in a sea of millions of delicious links.

Using Scuttle I have created my own delicious server.  It even workings with any program that uses the del.icio.us API.  It takes a few minutes to install.  You download the package

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle

and uncompress it on your server.  Create a MySQL database.  Import the provided database table.  Edit the provided profile file to include the name of your database, username and password.  That’s it.

I have already setup three different instances of the scripts.  I use one for my own bookmarks.  The others I use for student projects.  For my own bookmark, I exported my current bookmarks from my browser and used the built-in Scuttle tool to import them into the database.  Now all my new bookmarks go right into Scuttle.