Adding power to educational and research wikis with Semantic MediaWiki

Daniel Schneider & Julien Da Costa

TECFA, University of Geneva

Goals:

Raise awareness of SMW potential for education and research
Find other people interested in the subject
Show what we have done so far
Get some advice and have discussions
Meet at Opensim/WikiSym 2014 ?

There ispotential

Hurdles

(Most) people cannot

collaborate to commons
use wikis
understand hypertext
change work by others
track wiki activity

Opportunities for SMW

Improve

task collaboration
usability (forms)
wiki collaboration
data mgmt.
activities mgmt.

Main tools:

Semantic Forms

Semantic Result Formats

Citizen science research

Case study 1: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Portal:_citizen_science

Questions: Usability, voting

Improve wiki-based courses

Case study 2: "Bases psychopédagogiques" course

Questions: Aggregations for visualizations (1 data page per annotation)

Learning SMW

First hill to climb wasn't too hard
End-user tools could be improved, e.g. feedback when something goes wrong
Lack of documentation for advanced stuff

Plans 2014

Catalog on learning analytics tools
Support for project-based learning
Support for inquiry learning
Improve textbook navigation and search
More catalogs (including student made)

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Questions ?

Paper and slides available