Blog

Sherif Mansour blogs about seven wiki adoption tips for the enterprise. His fifth point has some applications in educational settings - for students, teaching staff and admin staff who are using wikis to compile a knowledgebase or to work on a project (or other things you can think of).

Refer people to the Wiki where you can
If you can’t use the Wiki practically in your job - no one can. Here are some really good tips to refer people to the Wiki;

  • Put your meeting Agenda, action items and minutes on the Wiki. Get people to update their action items on the Wiki page.
  • Use it as a starting point for all documentation. You might have a wiki page setup for a project. From there you could link to the key contacts, key documentation and project timelines etc. Or, you might have a wiki page for processes. From there you can link to various spreadsheets, forms and documents around your organisation.
  • Use it as your notepad - take notes there and share them with others.
  • If you are a manager - next time before you send a bulk-email to your teams distribution list, why not post it as a Wiki or blog item? Then email everyone from the team a link to it.

Can't remember exactly where I came across Sherif's blog, but I know that it is on one of the Wikipatterns pages.

E-portfolios

Apologies for leaving you without any posts to read during the 2nd half of last week. I'll try to make it up this week, with more posts... I hope!

Stephen Downes pointed to this JISC guide about e-Portfolios. Download the guide here (PDF).

CIT used to have an e-Portfolio service that did not have a high take up rate. There are several reasons for this that I can think of:

  • It was provided under the build it and they will come model. I believe not enough was done to convince students and teaching staff about the benefits of building e-Portfolios.
  • Consequently, no one was willing to integrate this into their course, as part of reflective learning.
  • Keeping an e-Portfolio was seen as extra work, which neither students nor staff were keen on.
  • Perhaps the software itself was not very conducive to building e-Portfolios. One key area with users seem to be that the e-Portfolio should have a customisable design and layout (at least on its public face). Our system was not flexible in that aspect. In fact, in the latter years, the option to publish the e-Portfolio was taken away entirely.
  • The e-Portfolio service was a walled garden. It wasn't easy to bring in digital artefacts, which may have resided on other public services, nor was it easy to repurpose that information into useful formats - personal reference, actual resume, showcase of work.
  • No one figured how students would access the e-Portfolios after they graduated as it was all based on our single sign-on system.

The guide highlights how other institutions of higher learning have gone about their e-Portfolio programmes. One thing that strikes me about most of the case studies is how the e-Portfolio building is directly integrated into the courses, i.e. the reflective process that is part of portfolio building is made as important (if not more so) as the end result.

Personally, I think blogging provides a rudimentary framework for reflective practice, and thus, the basis of an e-Portfolio. Combined with a systematic plan for integration in a course and other free online tools, e-Portfolios become a possibility.

Now, how do we convince the educators?

Screenshot (top) from JISC's Effective Practice with e-Portfolios, p 9.

You can create a simple image gallery within a post in Blog.nus. Just follow this video tutorial.

P.S. For some strange reason, I can't get it to work despite trying it on Firefox 3, IE 6, and Google Chrome on Windows as well as Safari 3 and Firefox 3 on Mac. Still, I've seen it on other blogs around Blog.nus, so it definitely works. There must be something wrong with all the computers that I touch...

PLYground

What are these strange protrusions encircling the Tembusu tree near CELC?

Find out from the students taking AR2101 Design 3, who have been blogging about their PLYground projects.

Since the semester began, Dr Patrick Janssen's students have been documenting their work, starting with conceptual drawings, progressing to scale model prototypes in the design studio, finally reaching the current phase - building the actual model.

From what I understand, these things are supposed to be stepped on...

It's been in the news a lot lately, this new race track.

No, not the Singapore F1 night-time street race track but the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which straddles Switzerland and France.

It's been the subject of much media coverage as there are those who are afraid that atomic scientists might recreate the Big Bang, destroying our universe and starting an entirely new one as can be seen in this comic at Geeks are Sexy.

If you have no idea what the LHC does, check out this rap video, explaining the ins and outs of this mega-sized and mega-powered underground doughnut.