usefulwiki.com

September is a busy month on the classroom displays blog with a new school year starting up. The number of people joining the flickr group and uploading pictures of their displays has grown from strength to strength in recent months.

There are no changes to report during the month of August when the education sector is largely taking a summer break.

The root page or top level entry point for the domain usefulwiki.com has been in need of attention for some time now, but it was the act of ordering some Moo cards for the London Theatre Breaks blog that really pushed me into finding the necessary round tuits.

I could decide to put the full url on the cards as http://usefulwiki.com/londontheatre which is OK, but a bit of a mouthful to mention. What if somebody only remembers the “Useful Wiki” bit. Ah, I’d better put a link to the theatre breaks stuff on the top level index.html page - but that was so ugly. All it did was to send people forward to the wiki itself and mention this blog.

I could have spent some time hand coding a nicer index page, but hadn’t got around to it in all the elapsed time up until now, but then the idea of moving this blog up one level popped up and it seemed like an ideal solution. Let WordPress take care of the fixed pages as well as the blog. I’ve already done this on the capitalstyle domain so I knew it should be possible without upsetting any of the stuff underneath, and by having a fixed page as the front page of the blog, it saves redirecting all of the archive of individual posts here because they can just be assigned to another page called “blog” which puts them back exactly where they were again

And now we have a nice looking (well, I think so) index reference page for anybody who goes directly to usefulwiki.com together with all the functionality of a WordPress blog to add sidebar widgets, blogrolls, updates and plugins.

With the technical setup ready and waiting, and some great content being added the time to announce the existence of usefulwiki.com to the world arrived in October.

First there was the Reinventing_Project-based_Learning book launch at a conference which Linda attended via skype, then an article written for Sharing best Practice by Linda which has caused a splash of interest. There have also been twitters and blogs, and some URL truncators from the Classroom Displays blog which is now piped into various LEA intranets.

Perhaps the most significant news for usefulwiki is that Linda is running a series of training courses for Teaching Assistants and putting all of her course notes on the wiki where students can access them between attendances at the LEA centre. This is what is called “eating our own dogfood”!

Thanks also to Geoff Dellow for creating the Recommended software for education page, which then inspired a Primary ICT page, which now needs to be completed together with one for secondary ICT. And so we begin to build, page by page, contact by contact.

The technical setup for usefulwiki is probably settled now for a while, and the main process is that of beginning to accumulate the first few sections of useful content, and the building of relationships and links with the first few individuals who are becoming inspired to contribute.

The wiki began with a section on Better Reading Partners , a scheme to encourage child readers who are mildly struggling.

To date we have some interesting notes on Project Based learning which arose from a conference seminar which Linda attended, the beginning of a very useful collection of resources on Practical Literacy Ideas and now some expert information and practical resources on the topic of Autism from “ultramum”.

There are several more new topics in the pipeline as well, with new people showing an interest in contributing some of their own resources, an act from which benefits both the contributor and the wider readership from now and into the future.

Yesterday I set about polishing off some of the outstanding requests and issues for the usefulwiki.

The status of these jobs is currently tracked on the More setup tasks page, but may get mentioned in the development category on the blog too, like this. So now we have

• a moveable search box,
• rss rendering,
• embedded media ( youtube and googlevideo) ,
• simple create a page
•  adsense template,
• uploading of pdf files enabled with direct linking,
• and a favicon.

The google analytics and hierarchy extensions might wait until there is a need.

Onwards and upwards with the content, community and contexts.

The reason

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2007/06/25/because-comments-are-social-objects-too

why

Testing the basic functionality of trackbacks by linking to:

sign-the-petition-to-defend-small-cider-makers.html

Spam Karma 2 , Sh-autolink and redirect all installed on this blog today.

We’ve got a lot of disk space and bandwidth available at usefulwiki, so we don’t need to rely on external hosting for pictures. There’s nothing wrong with uploading digital pictures to flickr.com and then displaying them here, but it’s nice to be able to offer the facility to upload directly, in the same way that, for example, wikipedia does.

But we haven’t just enabled the uploading of photographs, oh no. Get this - you can also share Word documents and pdf files at usefulwiki through the same upload system.

This means that at last there is a system available for educators, assistants and parents to easily share and write about educational resources without having to first register, login and email adminstrators with attachments then wait for the owner to get around to approving and uploading your stuff. This opens up enormous possibilities for usefulwiki.com to make big strides forward in building relationships between remote educators, resources and practices.