Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Web Focus
Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins
5/14/2008
Although Confluence has proved easy to use and maintain, Snowden cautioned that Web 2.0 tools in general can throw users unexpected curves by their very nature. Expect calls to the help desk, he said, simply because the tools don't always work quite the way users expect them too. "A wiki is a Web 2.0 kind of world," he warned. "People just aren't used to things that don't quite work the way they want them to... Things aren't necessarily perfect, and can change quickly."
Geoffrey Corb is director of student systems and educational technologies at Johns Hopkins. In that position, he moves technologies from idea to production--a perfect position to shepherd a wiki tool into the school.
Johns Hopkins has been using Confluence since 2004, when it was a new product--and wikis were a fairly new idea. The open culture and decentralized nature of academia lends itself well to wikis, Corb suggested. Having said that, he admitted that the initial vision at Johns Hopkins for using Confluence "failed miserably"--an idea to establish a wiki community to support a group of universities that were deploying the same student information system. Despite that start, the wiki has in fact flourished in another use at JHU--supporting one of the university's student information systems.
Despite that initial setback, Corb is now using Confluence in a different project related to one of the university's student information systems. This project uses Confluence as a simple way to provide online help to users. Eventually, Corb hopes use a wiki to allow administrative users to contribute to and augment the system's online documentation--using it to create collaborative help screens, in effect.
Although a number of courses at Johns Hopkins take advantage of wikis, the heaviest use occurs on the administrative side, as with MIT. "The lion's share of its use has been in support of administrative activity," Corb said, "but there is certainly interest [on the academic side.]" One reason for the lighter-than-expected academic use, he suggested: Many academic tools now include some sort of collaborative functionality that professors and students use instead, although they are usually more threaded discussions than true wikis.
Uses of Confluence at Johns Hopkins include plenty of IT project management, Corb said, such as meeting notes and agendas, documentation of development activity, threaded discussions of projects as they progress, and as a vehicle for collaboratively authoring policies and procedures.
"The thing I find most effective about Confluence," Corb explained, "is the ability to very quickly just create a page, or if you prefer, a news entry or a blog posting, with an idea. So I can say, I have an idea--I wish that I had something that did this ... and here's what it would do.... As soon as I do that, it shows up in the dashboard of everyone who has access to the space when I created the page. They might click on it out of nothing more than curiosity, and then start contributing to my idea. And before you know it, you have this snowball effect of creative innovation happening, from mundane topics to exciting topics."
Users range in capabilities from technical to non-technical, Corb said, but the rich text editor that Confluence added to the product more recently--making it easy to create large and bold text, for example, without writing code--has made it easier to use. "We saw a spike after [Confluence] introduced the rich text editor."
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Digital Arts Alliance Adds Fordham U
The Digital Arts Alliance, a consortium led by the Pearson Foundation that promotes digital arts in K-12 education, is expanding its membership with the addition of Fordham University. This follows on the heels of three other organizations joining the group back in July--the National Education Association (NEA) Foundation, the Foundation for Investor Education, and Employers For Education Excellence (E3).
- Payment Card Security Toughens with DSS 1.2 Release
Opinions are mixed on what the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) DSS 1.2 standard will mean for security pros going forward. However, the mandate is clear: protect data.
- 6 Universities Join NASA Astrobiology Institute
Research teams from six universities have been selected by NASA to become members of its Astrobiology Institute with the aim of exploring the "origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." Teams were each awarded five-year grants, averaging $7 million each, according to NASA.
- Amazon To Host Microsoft Solutions in the Cloud
Amazon announced Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon expects to offer companies the ability to run their applications on EC2 using Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server sometime in the fall, according to an announcement issued by the company.
- CRM Pushing into New Areas of Higher Ed
Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution can require "difficult or even painful behavioral challenges" for administrators in higher education, according to Nicole Engelbert, a lead analyst with research and analysis firm Datamonitor. "It means re-orienting yourself to your students. That can be tough, so you need to be ready for that."
- Integrated Collaborative Environment Leverages Web 2.0
Here's a bit of trivia for your next high-tech happy hour: A "nog" (in addition to being a Christmas favorite) is a wooden block built into a masonry wall so that joinery structure can be nailed to it. For the founders of Piscataway, N.J.-based startup Bluenog this obscure bit of carpentry nomenclature was the perfect metaphor for an integrated software suite that includes a content management system (CMS), rich portal features and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
