Thursday morning had no sessions. How weird! I wasnât too sure so I arrived about 3h before the opening session, registered, and started reading in the proceedings. As far as I can tell, nobody wrote about wikis. There is some research by Spanish bloggers on linking and powerlaw issues ussing the hispanic blogging community blogalia.com by fernand0 and atalaya.
The first keynote speaker, Johannes Cronje, talked about teaching â he doesnât use wikis (WikiSchool?) but I got interested nonetheless, because of his interesting classification of teaching š:
||Instruction (boring, fast)||Integration (goal driven, but providing the necessary tools to do the job)|| ||:--:||:--:|| ||Immersion (free form, playful)||Construction (free form, goal driven, may be frustrating)||
That was interesting. I think at the time I was teaching in *Instruction* mode because I felt there was little time to let the students do independent exploring. I promise to do better next time. ;)
I also sent him a mail asking about the use of wikis and mentioning SoftSecurity because he had talked about vandalism and trust on the website he uses for his students.
Other ideas in visualization: The two spanish bloggers mentioned above were putting blogs in a Cohonen map, essentially a 2D projection of the n-dimensional feature vectors of âhow often does this blog link to every other blogâ. I wonder if we could do the same to wiki pages, thereby creating a 2D map of all the pages and how they relate to each other. A *true* sitemap!
Another interesting visualization was done by Mohammed Rehman, where he showed how they were trying to visualize summaries of a bulletin board with threads of conversation (building on work by JudithDonath): What threads are active, who participated, etc. It doesnât scale, yet (less than 50 people) but theyâre going to try expanding in autumn. I wonder if we can visualize Recent Changes to help newcomers get a âfeelâ for the site. Who is active (trust) and who is not? What topics are âhotâ (editing) and what is not? What is popular (reading) and what is not? Clearly this is also stuff that goes against the WikiNow... I wonder what it all means.
*See my comments on MeatBall:WikiCircles. â SunirShah*
He also had another interesting idea: Leverage the browsing history of visitors by highlighting in each users browsing history how many other people have visited the same page recently. This essentially tries to leverage the *lurkerâs* knowledge of the site (since they read what is hot and popular) without us having to determine it...
Later I met Lilia Efimova and we strolled through town; later we met the two Spanish bloggers and some other people (14 in all) and ate dinner at the *Tasca du Manel*. I should link to the people I talked to in length, but I didnât get business cards from them all! If you talked to me that day and didnât give me your card, please mail me. đ
[2004-03-25T23:10+0100]
â#Conferences