Wiki-wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning quick. In Moodle and other learning content management systems (LCMS), a wiki is a collection of collaboratively authored Web pages that are set up to be easy to add to and edit. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org); you and your class are most likely familiar with this online encyclopedia.
Wikis can be powerful modules for collaborative activities because their structure includes Web page–editing capabilities that help you coordinate information between any number of class members. As a teacher, you can decide whether the entire class can edit a wiki together, or you can create group wikis that are editable by specific class members. Moodle ensures that wikis are easy to set up and even easier to use, which makes them a great resource for any type of course project.
Use your imagination and make wikis work for you and your class. Teachers and trainers use wikis in various ways: with a whole class, with multiple classes, with groups (subdivisions of courses), or with specific learners for individual research projects.
Here are a few ways that using a wiki can benefit your learners:
Just think of how green you and your learners will be as you save mountains of paper when you don't require your learners to hand in paper-based project work.
You have standard information to fill in and choices to make when you set up a wiki for your course. Preparing standard information for your wiki — such as a name and a descriptive summary — may seem simple, but giving a little thought to making these items informative, engaging, and intuitive for the class is important. Some choices you make affect the overall wiki configuration and determine who has access to read, edit, and add to the wiki materials. Other options you must choose are more technical in nature and relate to the level of complexity you want to incorporate.
The wiki name and summary description are required information in Moodle. Give your wiki a name that ties it closely to the course outcomes, learning objective, or specific project. In the summary field, describe the purpose of the wiki and how it will be used as part of your course, or if it's a wiki for a project, describe how you expect participants to contribute to it and how you'll assess it.
After naming your wiki and adding a summary, you need to determine how your wiki will be used with the course and set the appropriate permission in the Type field. This field is important because the setting determines who has editing permissions and can add to or help maintain the wiki, as follows:
Table 9-1 gives you a comprehensive explanation about setting options.
Creating and setting up a wiki are relatively simple processes. Moodle follows the same editing procedure that you use when setting up other Moodle modules. (See Chapter 3 for the discussion on basic editing procedures.) After you've decided where you want to add the wiki, follow these steps:
The front page changes to show editing tools, allowing you to change the appearance and add functionality to your course.
The editing tools are listed in Chapter 3 and on the book's Cheat Sheet at Dummies.com. (See the inside front cover for more details about the Cheat Sheet.)
Note the question mark icon next to certain features. Clicking this icon opens a help window that explains Moodle specifics about that feature.
Moodle takes you to the Adding a New Wiki page, shown in Figure 9-1, which has a similar layout to the pages for other activities — such as setting up a forum, as outlined in Chapter 8.
The top portion of the Adding a New Wiki page is shown in Figure 9-1; you have to scroll down to see the rest, which is shown next in Figure 9-2.
In the Summary description, if the wiki is meant to be used by learners for a project, you may want to add requirements and state whether you'll use any assessment to evaluate class members' work on the wiki. Be as clear and concise as possible. Bullet points may help here.
Your choice here sets the editing permissions, which I describe in the preceding section.
Usually, the default setting is HTML Only, which means you don't see the HTML tags.
Make your selection based on the technical skill level you have and the skill level you expect from your wiki participants. Unless you and your class are very familiar with HTML and want to add or change the look and feel of the page, you may want to stick with the default HTML Only setting and rely on the Moodle wiki editor, which allows you to view and edit HTML source code using the toggle editing tool. (See Chapter 5 for instructions on how to use the WYSIWYG editor.)
The other two settings are No HTML, which shows all HTML tags, and Safe HTML, which shows only certain tags.
Make choices for the following:
You always want the option to upload various types of media (other than text) unless your IT support puts a tight cap on space allowance. To combat this situation (should it arise), get your picket signs out and march with your class to the IT office and demand more space. Or picking up the phone or sending the IT folks an e-mail may work also.
If you don't disable CamelCase linking, you must make sure there's no space between the words you're using to link! I tend not to use CamelCase — it's prone to causing errors whenever students type text or copy and paste text into the wiki editor.
You can disable this feature because Moodle provides you with another way to create new pages — by putting brackets around the words. For example, if you discuss the [first moon landing], putting brackets around these words, Moodle recognizes this as an instruction to create a new wiki page, with the text in the brackets becoming a link to the new page. I go into further detail on this in the upcoming “Checking out a new wiki page” section.
Moodle gives students specific editing and administrative privileges, which you control. I cover each of these options in the next section.
Adding a name here is important only if you want the name of the first page to be different from the name of the wiki.
Moodle saves your settings and returns your new wiki-editing page, as shown in Figure 9-3. See Chapter 3 for a rundown of the Common Module Settings.