Thanks to a tip on Twitter I’ve just discovered a new wiki plugin for WordPress that I’m in the process of testing.  WordPress Wiki enables nominated individuals to collaborate on pages or posts in a manner that closely resembles the common convention found on wikis everywhere.

When installed, a new option becomes available at the bottom of both the post and page creation forms.  Ticking this option turns the content from a standard WordPress post or page into one that is editable by the group.  You are also able to activate an option that converts any heading tag used in the page/post to a clickable item listed in a Table of Contents listed at the top of the content.

For users with sufficient access permissions (author or contributor), the edit history is displayed at the bottom of the published item.  Users then have the ability to browse back through previous instances, and track who has made the changes.

With the wiki option enabled you can continue to use other standard WordPress options, such as embedded media or the WYSIWYG editor; it just turns content typically created and controlled by one person into something that is open it up to collaboration.

Why not just use a wiki?

All this being said, I don’t mean to suggest that you abandon your wiki of choice and use WordPress instead, because this framework can only do so much.  I see the option as a valuable way to extend the functionality of a blog – particularly a group blog – to support relatively light or infrequent wiki collaboration.  If you’re likely to be heavy wiki users it might make more sense to use a proper wiki.

The significance of using a combination WordPress/Wiki is that you gain collaborative opportunities for aggregation and synthesis of group input while retaining space to facilitate individuals’ reflections and subsequent group discussion.

Educational Use Case

As an educational use case for example, imagine the group work project.  Lets say 5 students are brought together and asked to work on a collaborative project throughout the session, with key milestones and deliverables expected (e.g. project components or short essays) and ongoing discussion and communication required.  Imagine as well that each individual student is expected to post weekly reflections (to track and assist their personal learning processes), as well as contribute to a series of group developed essays or presentations.

Each student could contribute their reflections in the form of standard blog posts, with group discussion taking place in the comments area – thus enabling an instructor to track participation and formatively evaluate how the group (and each group member) was progressing.

Plugin Recommendations

As a quick aside here, there are two key plugins I’d like to recommend here, each of which I believe have both technical and educational value.

• Threaded commenting – I’d strongly recommend using threaded commenting here, as it enables a quasi-bundling of conversations around topics rather than limiting them to the default chronological layout of blog comments.  This could help establish continuity of discussion for those engaged within it as well as facilitate a quick assessment of the outcomes of the conversation – including misunderstandings or areas of confusion.
• Syndication - I would also recommend incorporating a syndication plugin that could pull in content from other blogs using nominated tags.  This would enable encourage students to contribute their reflections to a personal space in the first instance and then have the posts related to the group project automatically reposted (syndicated) on the group blog.  The importance here is in establishing continuity in each individual’s learning journey by helping them track their growth and development over time.  As such it would facilitate reflection over a much larger scale in which they could review their experiences over the course of many posts, months or even years.

Enter the Wiki

Up to this point the individual reflections and group discussions could take place using the standard WordPress blog framework – now imagine what a wiki could facilitate in terms of project planning.

Blogs can do a lot, but they don’t lend themselves particularly well to frequent edits of single pieces of content by multiple people – though it is nonetheless possible.  Wikis on the other hand are designed to facilitate and track frequent edits by multiple people.

Each group could be asked to create a series of pages to document the planning, implementation and outcomes of a series of activities or key milestones.  Not only would the wiki plugin enable group editing, it would quickly show who had contributed each individual change and enable the group to revert to previous versions of the content if the need arose.

Diigo and Twitter

In addition to the blog/wiki framework outlined above there are a couple of additional activities that could be used to facilitate the group’s efforts, each of which could be tied back into the blog.  This would serve to both expand the collaborative opportunities, as well as provide even greater insight into the dynamic that was developing between group members, the content they were discussing and investigating.

Diigo - The creation of a Diigo group for tracking useful reference material would enable the group to amass and bookmark a collection of resources (websites, journal articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc) that could be used during the project planning, research and/or implementation.

Diigo also supports automated posting of bookmarked resources to the group blog.  This includes the annotations provided by the student adding the bookmark.  Effectively students could aggregate the links to these resources (and their notes about them) on the group blog, thereby retaining its status as a singular planning site.

Twitter - The use of Twitter as an open channel for discussion, sharing of links and networking with subject matter experts, other students or teachers around the world would provide an avenue for informal or brief discussions on topics that contribute to the progress of the project.

Additionally through use of hashtags (identifiers that categorise content using # followed by a descriptor – such as #learning or #unswphysics1001), students could quickly differentiate Twitter posts that relate to the project from those that don’t.

Hashtags are also searchable in Twitter, making it easy to view and even syndicate all posts that have been tagged with the same term. Using the same syndication plugin mentioned earlier, it is conceivable that the search results from the hashtag could be automatically posted on the group blog as well, thus documenting the group’s efforts even further.  This theory needs to be confirmed however.

The Result

In this use case, by the end of the session the group would have used the space for planning, reflection, discussion, review and evaluation in a manner that established a singular space for the group’s attention – as opposed to one site for a group blog (or even multiple individual blogs) and another for a group wiki. Additionally, through monitoring of blog reflections, comments, and wiki edits, the instructor could monitor each individual’s contributions for the purposes of clarification and instruction while the project was underway as well as summative assessment at session’s end.

Resources

Links to the sites or plugins mentioned in this post are included below:

• Diigo - http://diigo.com
• Twitter - http://twitter.com
• WordPress.org – http://wordpress.org
• WordPress Wiki Plugin – http://wp-wiki.org/
• Threaded Commenting – Threaded commenting comes native to WordPress version 2.7.  See the Discussion settings in the Dashboard area
• Syndication Plugin (“Feed Wordpress”) – http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/