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Apr 06
2009

Barcamp: Wikis and Collaboration

Posted by Andrew Luke

Andrew Luke
Presented and powered by Developer Oleg Lavrovsky, this quite generated feedback and were one of my favourite sessions of the day. A few of the pros and cons of wiki-ing - revision, pulling in content from around so that no-one person was left doing the job. Also there were issues of control in contribution - the taking up of time of the System Adminstrator. Oleg highlightd different approaches, such as ther personal wiki (being taken offline), noting that online and offline html is not a huge difference. Another problem was the issue of resources.

Oleg enthused greatly about TiddlyWiki, and its potential as a 'wiki-on-a-stick'. So its a portable wiki, which comes as a downloadable html file. Which runs in the browser, opens in the browsr, makes notes, saves as a file. (Apparently its builder Jeremy Ruston attended the Oxford Jericho Geek Nights a while ago)

"The application is also the document", says Ben Werdmuller, summing it up rather nicely.

More information on Ruston's blog about trying to explain the simplicity of TiddlyWiki

With wikis everything is open, nothing to be partitioned. Revisions are saved. A few more examples are offered,

MediaWiki : using markup lingo similar to Wikipedia
Confluence - Enterprise Wiki Software:  Open space knowledge contributed and used by Fortune 500 companies. Very easy to use.

We began to talk about the use of emoticons, perhaps in Confluence, and I mentioned Google Presentations use of these, as well as a chat window. I mentioned I'd had difficulties motivating students to use Google Presentations and as I'd gotten no feedback, asked whether folk had experience using it and could recommend its revision abilities in groupwork? No one had though Google Code Wiki was discussed..

Oleg's thoughts on TwiddlyWiki were its bridging a gap, providing an enthusing demonstration. TiddlyWiki not only has great tagging, emoticons and chat, but also games! There was even an inspiring chat about uploading from the phone.

There was just time to mention the Zooming User Interface of Project Cecily, which another facilitator offered had great advantages for visual thinkers.

If I were being true with myself, this blog entry would probably be up upon a wiki. If anyone wants to put this or any of the other Barcamp entries on one, feel free to copy and paste or ask me for the text document. Permission for replicating and editing information is hereby given.

Oleg's wiki can be found here.
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