Web Focus
Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins
In many ways, college campuses are an obvious implementation for a wiki tool. The decentralized nature of the technology and its ability to allow a wide range of individuals or groups to contribute ideas into a single area through Web browsers make wikis simple and compelling for higher education uses.
As a Web 2.0 technology--so-called because users can pitch in to collaborate on content--wikis may be a great tool for higher ed, but who is using them successfully, and how? To find out, we spoke with technologists at two schools--
MIT
and
Johns Hopkins University
--who have years of wiki experience. Both use a wiki product called
Confluence
, from Atlassian, a global software company based in Australia.
One interesting note about both schools: Despite original intents, administrative uses of the wiki tool outweigh academic uses.
MIT, which has been running Confluence for about three years, has several thousand users and a couple hundred classes using Confluence in some way. Academic uses range from urban studies to the Sloan School of Management; from a team developing an electric car to a committee on intellectual property. Despite all that, according to Carter Snowden, senior developer in MIT's information services and technology department, administrative uses of Confluence outstrip academic ones--contradicting what he initially thought the tool would be used for.
He hasn't found wikis a challenge to set up or maintain, Snowden said--the product has been easy enough to use that little user training or support is involved. "Confluence is pretty reliable; set it up and it runs itself," he said. "There's not a whole lot of worry about things going down." MIT has procedures in place when a user requests a new shared "space" in Confluence, which can be done by a designated person in the information technology department. Add-on scripts written at MIT make creating a space and assigning a space administrator a straightforward process even for a non-technical person.
Confluence did require some customization, Snowden said. For example, the product makes group members public automatically; MIT wanted to keep names private in some groups, so IT services created a macro to handle that. Snowden's group wrote some special authentication code as well, so that access to Confluence could incorporate the personal certificates and single sign-on technology that MIT incorporates to allow access to the Internet and applications.