We need to keep better tracking records for the various types of ongoing experiments that are constantly getting set up as part of daily online life.

That’s a problem I’m trying to solve, and the aim may be to have an action logging app that covers this kind of documentation eventually, in order to manage all those spinning plates while on the move, I’m talking mobile now, but in the meantime we came up with the idea of using MediaWiki templates to create structured project pages incorporating multiple cycles, on the intranet and other wikis.

MediaWiki templates provide a consistent style, even if it does look a bit blocky, and can be used to prompt for missing data, to make sure everything gets put down in words, figures and dates. Links and images too.

There are two ways of passing specific data over from the project page to the Template itself, one is using parameters that are referenced by position – 1,2,3 etc and the other is to used named parameters and I think I’m going to try using named parameters for the Cycle template. See there, I’ve already modularised the system by plumping for nested templates with the Cycle Template being called a number of times within some kind of overall Project Header template. They may not actually be nested in practice, but simply chopped together on the calling page but we’ll see about that later on once we get to the coding stage.

The Project template describes the project in terms of an area of online activity to be worked on and a stated intention for improvement.

To start with I’m suggesting the following specification

DARproject $Domain, $Aim, $Strategy to test, $Notes Other variables to take into account

using the above 4 variables to define the project, we next move on to look at individual cycles:

DARcycle $Cycle number, $Action to be taken, $Date actioned, $End date, $data collected, $Observed Results, $Reflection, $Conclusion, $Next Action to try

So that’s what I’m up to today, using Mediawiki templates to try and prototype a system for tracking distributed action research projects better online.

I’ve got the basic templates up and working using the specification outlined above, tweaked just a little to use positional parameters for the first two variable in the Cycle template, and named parameters for the rest. Rather than nesting templates inside each other, I’ve plumped for a simpler system of just calling the Header then instances of Cycle then the Footer from the content page, so I now have three separate templates which work together. The result is as intended.

Here’s a screenshot from a fictitious example which shows a rudimentary colour scheme and other visual indicators to try and make the functioning of the system as intuitive as possible

The next stage now is to start using the prototype templates for a small but real project as soon as possible and see how it goes.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Action Research Cycles MediaWiki Template

It isn’t totally clear who is mostly responsible for this state of affairs, but the most likely culprit seems to be a combination of academic publishing houses, university institutions and an elite of the most established academics themselves.

Recently a campaign has been born to try to free up the results of published research from out of the hands of the worst exploiters.

Elsevier — my part in its downfall.

Elsevier is not the only publisher to behave in an objectionable way. However, it seems to be the worst.

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

while other blame the University establishment:

it’s not publishers. It’s the universities themselves.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/04/12/the-academic-spring-shallo-rhetoric-aimed-at-the-wrong-target/

And now here comes news that none other than Jimmy Wales, the man who took the credit for Wikipedia and a well known Ayn Randian, is being drafted in by the libertarian Conservative/liberal British government to help “make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.” And it’s not just the abstract, summary of findings or the written up research conclusions which are intended to be distributed in an accessible form either:

“One of the big opportunities is, right now, a journal article might be published but the underlying data isn’t and we want to move into a world where the data is published alongside an article in an open format, available free of charge”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/01/wikipedia-research-jimmy-wales-online

There has also been a move by one of the big funders of research to back Open Access:

But science in general isn’t complete until it’s been published, and for the Wellcome Trust we want to maximise the impact of the research that we fund. That’s why open access is so important; research isn’t finished until it’s been published, and by publishing the results of the research that we fund in open access formats it means that as many people as possible are able to have access to the literature without any hindrance at all, and that of course will ultimately maximise the value and the outcomes of the research that we fund.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@msh_peda/documents/web_document/wtx063305.pdf

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Freely Distributed Research Data Coming Soon?

Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? – The Julie/Julia Project

It’s in a similar vein to this that one of the theatre bloggers in London has embarked on a challenge called “52 weeks, 52 fringe venues”. I couldn’t name more than a handful of London fringe theatre venues myself, so I subscribed at once in order to learn more about the wider scene. I’m also recommending the blog on which the challenge is published – “Distant Aggravation” as my choice for favourite theatre blogger in Theatre Blogger Week.

Corinne Furness, who writes Distant Aggravation describes herself as a “writer and theatre maker” and has also written a post on Blogging by Numbers : On Why It’s Time To Listen (or a love letter to theatre bloggers)

Theatre Blogger Week is an idea from MusicalVerse which is due to take place for the first year on 25th October 2010, open to theatre bloggers world wide and tracked on the Theatre Blogger Week Wiki page.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Theatre Blogger: 52 Venues in 52 weeks

UKOnlineCommunities, WorkNets. A culture for independent thinkers.

The list is young and obviously has huge gaps, as well as probably many entries which are listed more out of optomism than evidence of community, but it’s going to be well worth watching and contributing to.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

UK Online Communities

Version:

This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2007 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church and others.

MediaWiki is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

MediaWiki is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. or read it online

• MediaWiki: 1.11.1
• PHP: 5.2.42-servage10 (apache2handler)
• MySQL: 5.0.75

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Wiki Web Hosting at Servage

SearchWiki is Google 2.0

Searchwiki just started rolling out around the world today, so now you can log in to Google Search and when you see search results pages you don’t like – you can edit them.

Vote individual results up or remove them, share your edits and see others’ edits for the same page.

Not really.

How will this affect the standard Google search results over time? Nobody knows.

here’s a video from Google that shows how SearchWiki works, but as yet it’s still a little unclear as to how the sharing of edited Search Wiki pages will happen.

SearchWiki is simple enough not to warrant a screencast tutorial probably, but here’s a link to the Help page How to use Google Search Wiki

You might not want to see buttons and clutter in your search results so how can you use Google search without the new functionality and revert back to the plain vanilla version? Well one way is to log out from your Google account, but you find you have to log back in again whenever you want to use one of Google’s other useful web applicatios such as Gmail or Analytics.

There is a Greasemonkey script at how-to-disable-google-searchwiki which will give you the appearance of being logged out even when you are logged in, if you think that’s a good idea.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

SearchWiki from Google is LIVE

Cormac Lawler:

About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an alignment to known pedagogical forms. See Wikiversity_talk:Learning_resources#the_wiki_way.3F and below for some discursive material on this topic. It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity.

Andy Roberts asks:

Reading that discussion again on the Wikiversity page, it strikes me that both sides of the tension referred to are in fact agreed upon working within the same framework. The dispute, if I’m not mistaken is over the nature and quality of the learning resources which are to be accumulated in the Wikiversity. Neither side appears to be questioning the basic model of education based on learning from supplied content. The references to ‘experimental’ forms seem to remain within experimental forms of content provision, without questioning that preconception. Despite the claim that

“Wikiversity has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education”

the doing appears to consist entirely of editing pages to create more resources.
Do you think a bias towards conventional content based learning is built in to the wiki way?

C:

It’s a fascinating question – and I think you’re right that it is to a large extent. However – and this is more on the basis of knowing the involved people, rather than on what is on the page I linked to previously – I think that there has always been a strong desire to take a broad look at educational activity, and what role a wiki can play in that process. For example, some of the “content” produced on a wiki can be a record of a discussion where someone asks a question, and people respond with answers, suggestions, and/or questions of their own. Some of the content on Wikiversity has been explicitly initiated and developed as a debate – eg en.wikiversity.org/wiki/War_and_Iran. I don’t know if that conforms to your view of conventional content creation?

However, this “learning by doing” is a tricky concept – and I’ve been
pushing JWSchmidt, the originator of this concept in Wikiversity, to be more
explicit in explaining to me and the community what he thinks it might mean
in practice – and in detail. So far, I’ve found the concept as applied to
Wikiversity to be infuriatingly opaque – and I can see that others do too.
It’s something that I’ve always wanted to clarify on Wikiversity – what do
we mean by learning by doing, how can someone be guided through or motivated
to begin in such a model, and what kinds of educational experiences can we
anticipate, so as to scaffold learners if, whenever, and however
appropriate?

A:

How might other learning processes be facilitated through Wikiversity? I’m thinking of the newer emerging learning models such as connectivism, which would place the emphasis on the network between people and the community above content. This might require additional tools to the document based wiki, but needn’t be entirely separate.

C:

I agree – and we’ve been discussing tools to facilitate just such initiatives on a centralised page: Wikiversity:Technical_needs including the SocialProfile extension www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile. We already have a ‘sandbox server’ to experiment with different tools – but to actually get extensions and other innovations approved on a relatively small Wikimedia wiki is difficult when in the shadow of Wikipedia. However, with community mobilisation, and more developers’ resources at our disposal (a software developer hiring was just announced yesterday, and there may very well be more) – we should continue to build on the mediawiki platform to see what it can offer in the world of connected, collaborative learning.

I see we’ve forked into a discussion of Wikiversity – and it’s very welcome! – but I also very much wanted this discussion to focus on action research and issues that we’ve both experienced in an online AR context. I think I’ll leave this to my next mail.

Cheers,
Cormac

Earlier posts in this series:

• DARnet-interview-part 1
• DARnet interview part two
• Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity
• Part 4: Wikiversity and Wikipedia
  

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Learning by Doing – interview part 5

• DARnet-interview-part 1
• DARnet interview part two
• Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity

Andy Roberts asked:

I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.

Cormac Lawler replies:

There’s a real challenge in allowing for different models of education to take place in the same space. As you point out (and as has JWSchmidt in the page I linked to), Wikipedians will inevitably bring a particular culture with them in the development of what they think Wikiversity to be. (Although I’d be hesitant to make a grand generalisation on that point.) So one of the major challenges Wikiversity faces is to allow different communities develop microcultures of learning that are appropriate for them. However this itself raises a challenge around whether a microcommunity might develop that has questionable practices (like, say, Nazi apologists – to take an extreme example) – and what then could be done in order to subject a community, resource or statement to educational critique – or indeed, whether someone could be banned or their resources deleted. This brings us to the heart of the question you asked of what this institution is and who it is intended to serve.

Some examples of ‘different’ types of learning projects/communities would include things like the reading groups and podcasting and filmmaking initiatives (both long in decline). I would also regard some of the research activities to be exploring different means of using wikis educationally – including my own, and the Bloom clock (a means of logging what plants are in bloom, but also of learning about plants). There is also a recent initiative to question ethical practices within Wikipedia, which is purportedly an action research initiative, but which seems to be running in different directions at once, including a fairly traditional one (which could well be the participants constraining themselves to conform to what *they think* Wikiversity is supposed to be, ie an educational content creation mechanism).

However, having said this, I’m still slightly disappointed in the breadth of initiatives on Wikiversity that seek to challenge, expand or break the mould of more traditional models. I still think that this process needs more time, but I had hoped for more examples of what was possible at this stage, two years into its autonomous development. However, of course, I regard myself as very much culpable in this respect!

Andy again:

Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.

Yes, and for the health of the “regime”, see the ethical questioning project I linked to above (which generated quite a bit of unease and hostility in its beginning, and which may itself have ethical questions around it). I think you’re right to say that people will be able to find someone else to ask questions of – but it does seem to favour people who, as you say, already “know a little bit” about how to do so. I’d like to also help people who start from a lower base of social confidence or net-savviness – and this might partly be addressed through network, connectivist initiatives you mentioned in your subsequent mail. I think I’ll answer that one now, separately.

Cheers,

Cormac

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Cormac interview: Wikiversity and Wikipedia

If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity.

Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic.

When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody – Ed Mitchell – said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the ….

E-mint twitter list on DARwiki

The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections.

If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog.

If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page – which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed.

What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum

From now on, a history of post versions is retained in the database together with the date stamp and author details, so that different versions can be compared and if necessary reverted. That’s one of the main essential features of a wiki taken care of. With self registration and a granular level of administrative privilege already built in, it should be possible to set up a WordPress installation which is fairly open for public editing, just like a wiki. All that’s left to be added in order to give mediawiki a run for its money is a nice and simple way to link across between posts, by reviving the concept of CamelCase WikiText perhaps. Then there’s section editing, edit summaries and recent changes and the whole method of navigating from the post as published to the wysiwyg editor in the dashboard especially if this involves login along the way.

But the news is big because version 2.6 has just taken an enormous leap forward towards becoming something even more powerful. The idea of WordPress as a Wiki content management system is firmly on the agenda.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

WordPress as a Wiki

Cormac wrote:

About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an alignment to known pedagogical forms. See http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity_talk:Learning resources#the_wiki_way.3F and below for some discursive material on this topic. It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity.

Reading that discussion again on the Wikiversity page, it strikes me
that both sides of the tension referred to are in fact agreed upon
working within the same framework. The dispute, if I’m not mistaken is
over the nature and quality of the learning resources which are to be
accumulated in the Wikiversity. Neither side appears to be questioning
the basic model of education based on learning from supplied content.
The references to ‘experimental’ forms seem to remain within
experimental forms of content provision, without questioning that
preconception. Despite the claim that

“Wikiversity has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education”

the doing appears to consist entirely of editing pages to create more
resources.

Do you think a bias towards conventional content based learning is
built in to the wiki way?

How might other learning processes be facilitated through Wikiversity?
I’m thinking of the newer emerging learning models such as
connectivism, which would place the emphasis on the network between
people and the community above content. This might require additional
tools to the document based wiki, but needn’t be entirely separate.

I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project – in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.

Thanks for initiating this

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Questions about Wikiversity

According to the The the universaleditbutton.org wiki, the Universal Web Editing Button (UWEB) is going to allow www surfers to recognize more easily than at present when a visited site is open for editing by the public. So that’s handy for those of us who are already inclined to contribute to see the opportunity, and might also serve as an invitation to those who don’t edit wikis as a general rule, not having yet come across the idea of collaborative document building through public participation. As the editable web becomes better known and even commonplace, the UWEB button may become regarded as a badge of distinction and then serve as an incentive for organisations and site developers to add publicly-editable pages to their external sites, in order to be able to display the UWEB proudly.

To see the universal edit button in a browser, users will currently need to download a Firefox extension, (installation notes). In time, it is hoped that all browsers will include this feature as they have done for RSS feeds, and the original vision for an editable web will be one step closer.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

What is the Universal Edit Button?

This second episode continues the interview, again with Cormac’s questions in red, followed by my reply.

* So, which online university did you attend? What were you studying?

The online university was a research project itself at the time,
called “Ultraversity” and run by the now defunct “Ultralab” centre
attached to Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, Essex. I
registered an interest before it started up and was admitted to the
first cohort, who came to think of ourselves as guinea pigs for the
revolutionary new online degree with zero face to face element and no
content. That may sound a bit mad but you have to understand that the
BA Learning, Technology, Research degree is workplace based, so mainly
for adults in employment. The subject for the research and therefore
content for the degree then derives from individual circumstances. So
the Ultraversity research project was launched with high hopes of
becoming an independent force for transforming UK higher education,
but has ended up being absorbed into the Anglia Ruskin education
department, minus some of the ideals and as a shadow of the original
ambition. I hear that some of the original ex-staff are building
something elsewhere.

* Did your research there feed directly into what you do now, or are you referring to a grounding in research methods/practice?

In a way, yes I did manage to make my studies relevant to future work.
I set up the distributedresearch domain and the DAR wiki as a major part of it, for example, and one third of the subject (L,T,R) was a grounding in action research theory, methods and practice.

* Are you still affiliated with any formal study programme?

I really don’t have a taste for undertaking any post graduate studies,
but as one of the alumni, I still have access to the online community and I’m
a member of a small informal group where we try to help and sometimes
mentor individuals from subsequent cohorts.

* I’m still not sure if I understand the domain of your research. Is it fair to say that it’s all based on your own practice, and not that of a group?

At its best, action research is always participatory and I do work
with groups in terms of facilitating online communities, with a
particularl interest in communities of practice. But since I became
a full time work-at-home internet entrepreneur last year, I’ve needed
to concentrate at first on activities such as pro-blogging, hence the
need for a spot of first-person action research to get my own act in
order. My domain and primary interest is still very much the social web.

* What is/are that/those practice(s)? What is the relationship between your community/ies in/to your work?

Sometimes it’s a very indirect relationship. For example, one of my oldest communities of practice is the UK cider makers group “ukcider” which I convened and facilitated since 2001. There is no business model, and it’s sometime difficult to find a way to pay the web hosting fees, but I suppose I’ve learned stuff through the processes and development there which I then manage apply in other domains.

About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain
(Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of
making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an
alignment to known pedagogical forms. See Wikiversity_talk:Learning_resources#the_wiki_way and below for some discursive material on this topic.

Education is a political battlefield, and it often looks to me as if
the war was lost ages ago. The fundamental question is to ask “who is
this institution meant to serve?” which requires an understanding of
the nature of the state. Often the people who work in education start
out with idealistic notions of what the work is for, and imagine they
are helping to shape people’s minds in an empowering way, but end up
carrying out orders in the interests of the powers that be, who long
ago gave up believing that an educated general workforce is a
desirable thing as far as advanced capitalism is concerned. They need
people educated enough to be able to work the machines of an
information economy, and to be consumers in a digital age, but only a
small number are required to be independent, creative, critical
thinkers and problem solvers. So the prevailing model for education
is always content based, with the students viewed as empty vessels to
be filled. Even the UK Open University, which was born out of the pro
labour reforms in post war Britain, has been based largely on a pushed
content model, now with added forums.

I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.

It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity. I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project – in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.

You’ve used a phrase from Wikimedia’s mission – “the sum of human
knowledge”. Do you think such an entity exists? How do you see it? How do
you have access to it? How do you participate in it?

I’ll rephrase that to “The full extent of human knowledge” because of
course knowledge doesn’t really have a sum, does it!

Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.

End of part two of the DARnet interview. To be continued.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

DARnet interview part two.

I like the quirky design for being bold enough to champion household objects on a dish, for the seemingly impossible shape of one or two of the designs depicted, and above all for the cheerful optimism of 1960′s modernism. I didn’t even know it was designed by Enid Seeney before reading the Object Wiki entry, but this led me to explore the background to the plate on the C 20 th site which is also home to theatre memorabilia.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

The Homemaker Plate – for Object Wiki

So any tool which generates nice plain simple wiki text from other inputs is going to be great for migrating content from out of email attachments and intranet databases and out onto the flat hierarchy of the open wiki space.

I generally use this one for converting from HTML pages into mediawiki syntax:

HTML::WikiConverter

and the tip below for converting to html through gMail is a good one too. Did you know you can use that technique to convert pdf’s into editable text as well?

Convert Word doc or Webpage to wiki – A Consuming Experience

For me, the two ways which worked the best were:

• Convert Word to HTML via Gmail, then convert the Webpage’s HTML to wikitext with Emiliano Bruni’s excellent HTML2Wiki Converter (where you paste the raw HTML code into the top box, and the wiki code appears in the bottom box which you can copy and paste into your wiki). Or (less good in its conversions, I found) -
• Convert Word to wiki direct using a Word macro – Word2MediaWikiPlus worked OK, though nowhere near as well as the above, for a MediaWiki wiki and PBWiki wiki that I tried them on (and those are probably two of the more popular wiki software platforms around); the results needed quite a lot of tidying.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

How to convert a Word doc or HTML to Wiki Markup

This is the newest and shortest. I want to compare the alternatives to googlegroups and yahoo for hosting a simple email discussion group. I’m thinking that self-hosting will provide better stability long term, but so far the only options to examine are Majordomo and Mailman. Know any better? then please edit the wiki

http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Email_list_hosting

This is a wiki page for the group of London bloggers who meet up monthly in a pub near Waterloo Station. If you are a London blogger why not add yourself to the wiki and consider coming along next month, March 25th.

http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/London_bloggers

This one also started out from asking a question, or rather hinting at a problem on Twitter and then needing to collate and expand on some useful responses. I want to find the best UK based web hosting company, with the right attitude towards helping people to host the latest Wikis, WordPress multiuser, Ruby on Rails etc. The offshore hosting companies are also interesting when they are very cheap, but is the service reliable?

http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Web_hosting

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

New wiki pages

Well done Miguel de Icaza for honestly blogging about the mistakes as well as the accomplishments, there’s a lesson for us all there I think.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

95% of Mac users downloaded the wrong version

To explain why I migrated my own blog from Movable Type to WordPress a couple of years ago  I said that my Movable Type blog was hosted for me by an organisation which now no longer exists, so a move to my own domain was a sensible step to take.  At the time, MT was the best blogging software available, but it was overtaken by WordPress several years ago.  What is the current situation though?
WordPress is getting ever more popular but there may be signs that the core code  is getting slightly over ambitious, with successive new releases breaking established plugins and themes. People are sometimes frightened to upgrade.

And Movable Type 4 has been developed, released as Open Source with maybe some of the fancy features from Vox incorporated, but I don’t have direct experience of that.

If you were a new blogger with no baggage or archive to lug around, starting completely afresh what would be your choice of platform and why?

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

Movable Type and WordPress

Mediawiki Images

Mediawiki handles uploaded images on pages in a way which is perfectly suitable for a free encyclopaedia. If you click on an image you get taken to special page which tells you more about the image itself. Who uploaded it, where it came from, any revision history and which other pages link to it. But what if you want to use an image just as a graphical link, such as a button or banner that takes you to the page which the image is about? That’s quite a reasonable requirement because it’s how the internet usually works, it’s what what visitors are more likely to expect. Sending them to a dead end meta page full of technical data might not be what you want to do. So this article will show you how to make image links work properly in mediawiki.

For my example I’m going to upload a new image file to UsefulWiki. The file is a logo button for the Better Reading Partners section of the wiki, which I want to feature on the Main Page. Not all installations of mediawiki have enabled the uploading of images, but this one does. You can tell because there’s a link in the left hand side Toolbar: “Upload File” The upload process is straightforward, but it’s worth copying the hint which appears there, as it’s harder to find again later.

To include the image in a page, use a link in the form [[Image:file.jpg]],
[[Image:file.png|alt text]] or [[Media:file.ogg]] for directly linking to the file

I tried something like that in the Sandbox with this result (screenshot):

The orange BRP logo is a bit too large so I can adjust the syntax to ask for it to be rendered only 70 pixels wide.

[[Image:Brp-logo.gif|thumb|Description|70px]]

That’s better, but you see how clicking on the button takes you here? when you might expect to go to the Better Reading Partners page. I’m going to fix that by getting rid of the syntax for direct image linking and using the syntax for building an external link instead, using the full URL of the target page:

[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners description]

then replacing the description with the sytax for rendering an external image directly onto a page – which is just the full url of the hosted image. In this case I can find out the exact location of the image file by right-clicking ( ctrl-click on my Mac ) the image itself and choosing “Copy image location”. That’s then pasted in instead of “description” above to give

[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners http://usefulwiki.com/w/images/thumb/a
/a6/Brp-logo.gif/70px-Brp-logo.gif]

( all on one line, just one space chracter between the two urls )
What’s happening here is that the image is being retrieved and then used just like anchor text for the link, like a hyperlinked description, except that it’s a picture. That works fine in the sandbox, but there’s one more thing I can tweak. The little blue arrow which denotes an external link needs to go, because it’s an internal page which I’m linking to.

I can get rid of it by wrapping the whole piece of code in a little bit of CSS:

<span class=”plainlinks”>…….</span>

so all I have to do is transfer the code over to the UsefulWiki Main Page.

Done. Any questions? Ok….

You might use it with externally hosted graphics instead of uploading image files to the same mediawiki.

If your mediawiki does not have direct rendering of image files enabled, it won’t work. So in LocalSettings.php, set $wgAllowExternalImages = true;

more in comments….

If you enjoyed this post about image links in mediawiki you may wish to subscribe to my category “wiki” posts, or the full feed for this blog.

• Subscribe to RSS Feeds:

• “Wiki” only
• Full feed

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

How to make image links in MediaWiki

There’s also a recording of the Flashmeeting which can be replayed

BETT itself was pretty dire, with all the usual vendors trying to flog their old technology, unlikely promises and crap content to the people who get to spend money in the education sector.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog

TeachMeet08 at BETT