Zambia/eL4CF2F Zambia/Zambia F2F tutorials

The following are tutorials for a 3-day Face-to-face WikiEducator Learning for Content (L4C) Workshop. It has been arranged in a simplified manner with links to the main WikiEducator tutorial pages. Simply click on the blue highlighted text to take you to relevant pages (tutorials).

= DAY ONE (1) = Welcome to the very first day in our bid to become WikiBuddys!!

Introduction to Web 2.0 Technologies
Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developes and End-users use the Web. According to Tim O'Reilly:

eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, Adsence, Flickr,Docs & Spreadsheets and iTunes (because of its music-store portion, MapQuest, and Maps Google Maps may all be considered as examples of Web 2.0 technologies/applications though they may have different levels.

Now relax, and lets explore the details of these objectives bellow.

What are open source technologies
Open Source does not only mean the availability and freeness of the source codes of softwares, it also means that the sofware should meet the ten critera stipulated and ardently promoted by the Open source community. Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

Champions in this community include Open Source Initiative, SourceForge, Mozilla Foundation.

The Open Source Definition is a bill of rights for the computer user. It defines certain rights that a software license must grant you to be certified as Open Source. Those who don't make their programs Open Source are finding it difficult to compete with those who do, as users gain a new appreciation of rights they always should have had. Programs like the Linux operating system and Netscape's web browser have become extremely popular, displacing other software with more restrictive licenses. Companies that use Open Source software have the advantage of its very rapid development, often by several collaborating companies, and much of it contributed by individuals who simply need an improvement to serve their own needs.

What is a Wiki
the following questions may be helpful:
 * 1) What do you understand as the general definition of a Wiki?
 * 2) What a some examples of Wikis?
 * 3) what are some uses of Wiki technology?
 * 4) what are the advantages and disadvantages of using wikis?
 * 5) Are there quality considrations is using wikis?

Introduction to WikiEducator, Moodle, etc.
Before we go further to explore all the benefits of OER, Open Softwares and collaborative content development, lets take a quick tour of the "whats" and "whys" of WikiEducator (WE).

The values of WikiEducator's community

It is important to recognize and respect the core values of the different wiki communities. The Wikieducator community believes in the following values:
 * 1) The social inclusion and participation of all people in our networked society (Access to ICTs is a fundamental right of knowledge citizens - not an excuse for using old technologies).
 * 2) The freedoms of all educators to teach with the technologies and contents of their choice, hence our committment to Free/Libre and Open Source technology tools and free content.
 * 3) That educational content is unique - and by working together we can improve the technologies we use as well as the reusability of digital learning resources.
 * 4) In a forward-looking disposition working together to find appropriate and sustainable solutions for e-learning futures.

Creating a WikiEducator Account
Join the community!! Go ahead and create your personal WikiEducator account NOW!!

Setting up your personal WE webpage
After you have registered for an account with WE, sign in. Remember that your username and password are all case sensitive.
 * 1) On which ever page you are in on WikiEducator, once you are logged in, the following "links" will show on the top-right-hand corner of the WE page your are opened to.
 * 2) Some of the "links" will be in "red" while others will be in "blue" . Take a few seconds to familiarize yourself with these
 * 3) Two "links" - your and "my talk" will be "red links" in the first instance. This is because though they are pages that have names now, there is not contents. In other words, no "editing" has been done on them.
 * 4) Click on your username. A message appears that says "There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page ."
 * 5) Click on edit this page ."; start typing any text you desire and click on the ave page''' bellow the text area.--Kelvin kayombo 06:08, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Introduction to WikiMedia Editing
Gone are the times when editing could only be done by the "professional" or IT "wizard". "Anybody" can edit on WikiMedia packages (including WE) - and that is what a real wiki should be about. While some PHP and HTML codes can be used and recognised by this wiki, it is not essential to letting you have the ability (and pleasure) to edit. The knowledge in editing you gain in this tutorial should enable you to edit in WikiEducator and all other WikiMedia based platforms such as WikiNews, WikiVersity, WikiQuote, Wiktionary, WikiTravel and several others.

You can download the Cheatsheet for basic formatting syntaxes [[Media:Cheatsheat1.pdf|here]]. Check a fuller Wikipedia Quick guide; or How to Edit a Page or go through the steps bellow.

WikiMedia and “Sisters”
There are many sites hosted by the WikiMedia Foundation using the WikiMedia softwares.

Editing Basics
Note that the wiki has been designed to make editing as simple as possible. With the exception of a few protected pages, every page on WikiEducator can be edited.

Every page that is editable will have a link along the top of the main content area that says "edit". Pages that are locked for editing will be substituted with a "View source" tab. Don't worry about this detail now - finding your way around a wiki page will become second nature.

Where are the edit links?

You will find the main edit link as a page tab, above the content area of a page. On pages that have subheadings, you will also find an "[edit]" link next to the heading to edit that particular subsection of the page. The edit links let you do exactly that: edit an entire page or single section within a page.

Basic Text Formatting
WikiEducator uses a kind of simple text markup to format particular elements of the page (e.g. bold, italics, headings, etc). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing. Much of this simple formatting can be added to your content by using the Editing toolbar that appears while you are in editing mode, but you can also type the syntax in by hand. Not all of the formatting options that are available to you on the wiki are accessible through the Editing toolbar so you will need to learn how to enter some of this syntax by hand. This will be useful if you wish to delve into the more sophisticated formatting devices that may be dealt with in later tutorials.

Creating your own practice area

When learning new editing skills, or testing more complicated layout features it is useful to have your own practice area on the wiki. The following activity will show you how to create your own sandbox or practice area.

WE WILL NOW CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:
 * Bold and Italics
 * Headings and Sub-Headings
 * Indenting
 * Bullets and Numbered Lists
 * Mixing list types

Lab Work: Participants will work on their own contents
Thanks you for your participation during the morning session. During this afternoon's session and early morning tomorrow, go through the following:


 * 1) Fill up you main user page (not your sandbox) with an essay about yourself
 * Use at least four different headings like


 * about myself
 * my work,
 * my passions (What i like)
 * why i joined this workshop (expectations)
 * my family, etc.

All the best. And see you tomorrow.

--Victor P. K. Mensah 10:02, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

--Sngosingosi 15:00, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

= DAY TWO (2)=

Creating New Pages
To create a page, first think about where you might want your page to be linked from. Say you want to create a page for your new Chemistry course. Ideally, there should be a link to this course from a page listing all the science courses. You would go edit the science course page to add a link to your new Chemistry page — even though your page hasn't been made yet. Once you save your changes and click on the new link, you'll be given the opportunity to create the page.

In this first method you are creating a hyperlink in a page to another page that does not yet exist in the wiki. This can be a difficult concept to grasp at the start, but once you see how it works it should become perfectly clear. Creating a link in your content is an easy process that can be done either by using a simple wiki syntax or through the editing toolbar that appears while in the Editing mode.

It is possible to create a page without making a link to it first, simply type the name of the desired page onto the end of the http://www.wikieducator.org/ url, like this http://www.wikieducator.org/Coffee and hit enter. This would then take you to a page called Coffee and prompt you with the option of creating the Coffee page. But remember: because you made the page without first making a link to it, it might get lost in the sea of pages. Linking is very important for this reason — If you don't link your new page from existing pages, then no one will be able to find it. Spend some time thinking about good places where you should make a link to your new page. Using the search box is very useful for finding phrases and material where you might want to provide a link.

Creating Page links
Links to pages within the wiki are called internal links or wiki links and can be created as follows:

Using the Wiki Syntax to create a link to a page, surround the word you wish to use as your link in double square brackets like this: New Page

This will create a link when your content is saved (or previewed) called "New Page"

You can also use the Editing toolbar to perform a lot of simple formatting on the wiki, including creating links to pages.

Piped Links

There will often be times when you want the diplayed text of a link to be different than the actual name of the page you are linking to. You may, for example, want to create a link that displays to the user as "Next Page" but the page itself will be called "ProjectPage2" or "ProjectPage3". If you want the displayed text of the link to have a different title than the actual page name you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards).

The pipe "|" is then followed by the alternative name. For example: display text

Using this type of syntax you can create a link to say the eXe Manual with a different link text like this: The eXe User Manual

which will appear as a link like this: "The eXe User Manual"

External links

There are a few ways to create links to external web sites in the wiki. You may simply type in the full URL for the URL page you wish to link to, eg.  http://www.exelearning.org

The wiki will automatically treat this text as a link (as has been done with the URL above) and will display the raw web address, including the "http://" part. It is recommended that you don't use this format much, as raw URLs are ugly and often give no clue to what the site actually is.

The best type of link for most situations includes a description after the address. This description appears as the title of the link e.g. eXe Web Site. To create a link like this just type a link and the description, separated by a space and enclosed in single square brackets: eXe Web Site

This will create a link to the eXe web site that appears like this: eXe Web Site.

Assessing what-links-where?
inserting an internal link referring back to the "parent" page.
 * 1) The easiest way to move back from any page is to go to your toolbox on the left-hand side of the page and 'Click on the "What links here link". This will list all the pages that link to the current page you are viewing.
 * 2) There are more sophisticated techniques you can use by adding your own navigation to the respective page, for instance:
 * 1) inserting a navigation template which we deal with later in the tutorials. We recommend that you tackle this alternative once you have gained confidence with internal and external links.
 * 2) using the slash argument when creating subordinate pages, which we also cover later in the tutorials.

Handling Images and Media
Wikis are meant to be simple looking and straight foward. Keep them that way!! They are however able to host a lot of documents and media at user's will.

We will mainly focus on adding images to your content but the same principles apply to all media you may want to add to the wiki. More sophisticated media types like sound and movies will be covered in the intermediate Tutorials for WikiEducator. Currently WikiEducator supports adding the following types of media: Images - these can be .gif, .jpg, .png, or .svg formats; Links to specific file types, currently .pdf, mp3 files and .elp (eXe files)

Basic syntax

Move to where you would like the image to appear and insert the most basic syntax for adding an image :

Using an existing image available on WikiEducator

Uploading a new image on WikiEducator from your computer

When uploading a new image onto the server, after you have saved your page the wiki syntax will appear like this: Image:Picture.jpg

For the image you have added, you can also:


 * Make it a thumnail
 * Change the size
 * Change the allignment - left, right or centre, and
 * Add a caption

Inserting portable document format (pdf) files

Sometimes, you may want to insert a link for users to download a file. Remember that the Wikieducator community does not prescribe which software users should use, but we are committed to providing resources in formats which must have the minimum requirement that they can be viewed and/or edited with free software alternatives.

The basic syntax for inserting a pdf file is: [[media:name_of_file.pdf|Piped link text goes here]]

upload an MP3 audio file

Alternatively, you may want to upload an MP3 audio file for user's to download or launch in their desktop media players. (There are ways to insert MP3 audio for playback directly in the browser, but we will deal with this in the intermediate tutorials). The basic syntax is similar to the pdf example above: [[media:name_of_file.mp3|Piped link text goes here]]

Collaborative Editing
Creating educational content on WikiEducator is quite different from what you may be used to. WikiEducators' contributors may come from many different countries and cultures and have different views, perspectives, and backgrounds, sometimes varying widely. Treating others with respect is the key to collaborating effectively in building useful resources on WikiEducator. Remember that all resources on WikiEducator are viewable and potentially editable by anyone who creates an account. Expect your work to be edited by others and resolve any disputes or leave comments by using the Discussion pages.

Collaborative content authoring
The beauty of OERs is that they can and are open to contributions from all walks of life. Several educators generously contribute to making an OER complete and usable by many. By agreeing to be receive this free training from the WE community you have agreed to contribute to other's content while agreeing for others to contribute to yours. Contribution is editing - adding on to content as well as deleting parts of content. The guiding priniples to doing this should be ETHICAL CONSIDERATION

In the WikiEducator (WE) Community, work is based on a consensus model. In practice members of WikiEducator agree to work as follows:
 * 1) Draft plans, outlines and suggestions are created on the wiki. Anyone is free to create a new wiki page in relation to any content.
 * 2) Consensus discussions take place in the Discussion pages (i.e. the Discussion or User talk tabs you will find above the content area of each page).
 * 3) Once consensus is achieved, please make the necessary changes on the relevant wiki page.
 * 4) Minor edits, improvements and new additions are usually done without discussion.

Reverting
Viewing the diff between two versions of a page is the best way to get a detailed view of what exactly has been changed on a page.To revert a page is to undo all the changes made to that page after a specific time in the past. The result will be that the page becomes identical in content to the page as it was saved at that time. Reverting is a decision which should be taken seriously and is primarily used for fighting vandalism. If you are not sure whether a revert is appropriate, discuss it first using the discussion or talk pages rather than immediately reverting or deleting it. If you feel an edit is unsatisfactory, try improving it rather than simply reverting or deleting it.

To revert a page to an earlier version:

You can navigate backwards or forwards through the chronology of changes by using the '←Older revision | Current revision | Newer revision→' links.
 * On the page you wish to revert, click on the History tab. Then click on the time and date of the earlier version you intend to revert to. It will not work if you click on 'cur', 'last', or "Compare selected versions".
 * When the page displays, text similar to this: (Revision as of 15:35, 21 December 2006;), will display at the top of the page below the page's title.

Diff and History tools
History

All editable pages on WikiEducator have an associated page history, which lists all changes made to the page in reverse-chronological order. You can access this information by clicking on the history tab that is located at the top of every page. Viewing the history of a page is kind of like looking at the recent changes, but in this case the changes are just for this page.

Diffs

The history page also allows you to compare changes between one edit of the page and others. A diff is the difference between two versions. It can be viewed by clicking the page history tab at the top of every page. For every version or change that has been made to the page there are potentially two radio buttons: the left column is for selecting the older version, the right column for selecting the newer one. Pressing "Compare selected versions" gives the difference between the two versions.

Understanding recent changes
The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in WikiEducator. Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users, allowing mistakes to be corrected and to track where activity is occuring. There is a link to the Recent Changes page in the sidebar of each page.

Collaborative Interactions
We have already mentioned the collaborative nature of authoring content on the wiki and will now look in greater detail at some of the tools that are available to facilitate communication and interaction between authors and collaborators.

Besides checking the Recent changes page there are a number of ways to keep closer track on what is being changed on the wiki, as well as tools and spaces where discussion about content development and projects can take place.

Discussions boards
The discussion tab (sometimes called the Talk Page) is an essential part of the WikiEducator environment and can be found at the top of every page. This space can be used to leave notes or start discussions about the page you are viewing. Talk pages provide a space for editors to discuss changes and makes suggestions about the associated page. The talk page is the same as any page on the wiki and accepts all wiki syntax and editing that other pages do.

Email interactions
Email notifications

If you are logged into the wiki you will have the ability to modify some preferences on how the wiki works for you. One of the preferences available to you from your my preferences page is to notify you via email when a page you're watching is changed. This can be very a very useful way to keep track of changes to pages or project you are interested in.

My Contributions

The my contributions page is a special page that keeps track of which pages you have worked on. Checking your contributions is a useful way to refresh your memory about pages you have worked on (and to easily access these again), and can also be used to find out whether there have been any subsequent edits. This makes it possible to "watch" pages even if you haven't put them on your watchlist.

Other users' User contribution pages can also be accessed and are useful for seeing how other users have contributed. To see another user's contributions, bring up the user's User page (User:username) and click on User contributions in the left hand toolbox.

Talk pages
My Talk pages

Every page on the wiki has an associated discussion or talk page, even your User page. The talk page of your User page can be used by others to contact you to discuss projects or edits that you have made. The my talk link at the top of this page (assuming you are logged in) will take you to your talk page. Other wiki users may use your talk page as a way to contact you to discuss a project or to introduce themselves.

How to use the talk pages


 * Try to keep on topic
 * Discuss edits
 * Make proposals
 * Sign your posts
 * Try to be concise
 * Keep the layout clear

Lab Work: Participants will work on collaborative content development (each other’s contents)
= DAY THREE (3)=

WikiEducator Pedagogical Templates
We briefly touched on the use of templates for creating navigation aids in the previous tutorial. Now we will turn to the practice of including Pedagogical templates or iDevices into your WikiEducator content.

The idea of isolating the instructional devices (or iDevices) of learning content was a primary aspect of the eXe Project. eXe was developed around the idea of iDevices which included a range of pedagogical forms e.g. objectives, case studies, reading activities, etc., which constitute the equivalent of the teacher talk in content resources designed for online learning. The notion of iDevices was derived from the practice and experience of designing instructional texts for distance education, with modifications for contemporary digital technologies. iDevices are structural elements that describe learning content and distinguish teaching content from other forms of content like text books or journal articles.

A range of iDevice templates have been developed in WikiEducator that you can use in your content. If you have been following along in these tutorials you may have noticed a couple of them already. In the following sections we will learn the basic syntax required for including these pedagogical templates inside your content and take a look at examples of the iDevice templates available to you.

To use one of the iDevice templates surround the name of the template in curly braces like this: 

List of some iDevices available on WE (You Can help develop more)


 * {{Key_points
 * {{Media}}
 * {{Objectives}}
 * {{Outcomes}}
 * {{Preknowledge}}
 * {{Reading}}
 * {{Summary}}
 * {{Tell_us_a_story}}
 * {{Web_Resources}}
 * {{Media}}
 * {{Objectives}}
 * {{Outcomes}}
 * {{Preknowledge}}
 * {{Reading}}
 * {{Summary}}
 * {{Tell_us_a_story}}
 * {{Web_Resources}}

{{Tip|If you notice a page that looks like it may include a template that you might like to use, click on the top edit link then look below the Save page buttons for a list of the templates that have been used in that page. Clicking on a Template link will take you to the templates page. Often the template page will include some instructions on its Talk page on how to incorporate the template into your own content.}}

Thinking About Wiki Structures
The structure of a wiki is best described as a network. Similar to railway networks each page in a wiki is a node in the overall network, and can possibly link to, or be linked from, any other page in this network (or any other node in the greater network of the World Wide Web). Clearly marking this network to prevent users from getting (unnecessarily) lost is quintessential in obtaining an effective content.

It may often be desirable though for educational content to appear more structured, and it will be useful to link pages to each other while maintaining a reference to their logical structures and relationships with other pages.

Fortunately the Mediawiki software we are using is very powerful and there are easy ways to link pages according to their logical and structural relationships with other pages. This kind of structuring may also be thought of as creating Subpages. There are other ways in which you can provide visual or navigational clues to reflect the structure of your content. Creating Navigational templates and using Categories can also provide an overview of your contents' structure and help users to navigate through the network.

If you look at the title of this page you will notice that it is called:  http://www.wikieducator.org/Zambia/eL4CF2F_Zambia/Zambia_F2F_tutorials . eL4CF2F_Zambia is a subpage (or call it child page) of the parent page called Zambia. While Zambia_F2F_tutorials is also a child of the subpage called eL4CF2F_Zambia

Making a new link that begins with a / (slash) is the common way to start a subpage. The page to which this link points is considered "subordinate" to its host page, and is titled and linked as  Parentpage/Subpage . It is possible to create a subpage of a subpage (or a sub-subpage). At the top of each subpage or sub-subpage, you can find a backlink (aka breadcrumb) to the higher levels of the page.

Creating Templates

To create a template you need to create a page with "Template:" as the first part of the name. The usual way we have been creating new pages in the wiki up to now has been to create a link in some content to a page that doesn't exist yet, then follow that link to edit the new page ... but templates are a little different because we are not really creating a link to the template itself, just including it in the page.

The easiest way to create a new template is to manually enter the name of the template into the URL bar of our browser after the http://www.wikieducator.org/ part, then either hit enter or the Go button. Like this: EXAMPLE:  http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:New_template 

then click on the edit this page link to create your template.

Your template is just like any other wiki page and can contain any wiki markup or HTML code. If you wanted, for example, to create a simple navigation template you could include something like this: Home | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3

then, to include this template on your projects pages you would add this to the top of each page:  and it would appear something like this: Home | Section1 | Section 2 | Section 3

A Category is a kind of grouping of related pages. This page, for example, belongs to "Category: Wikieducator Tutorials". When a page belongs to one or more categories this information generally appears as a link at the bottom of the page. Clicking on this link will display all the pages on the wiki that are associated with that category.

Putting a page in a category A page can be put in a category by adding a category tag to the page (by convention, at the end of the page), e.g.:

This lists the page on the appropriate category page automatically and also provides a link at the bottom of the page to the category page. Pages can be included in more than one category by adding multiple category tags. To see a list of all the currently available categories in this wiki see the page, Special:Categories for a list of all the categories in this wiki.

Creating a Category

If you have checked the Special:Categories page and there is not an already existing category that might apply to content you are working on, you can create a new category by adding the syntax to your page. After saving your page you should follow the link that has been created for your new category and place some instructions on that page to let other users know how to use the new category. Follow the category link at the bottom of this page to see how a category page looks and what type of instructions to add to the page.

Way Forward/Declaration
Your answer illustrates the scalability of free content - relatively small numbers of committed educators can have a huge impact on the rate at which free content is developed. All it requires is a personal commitment, every content contribution adds to the intellectual commons, and will be available for use and modification indefinitely

--Victor P. K. Mensah 15:59, 20 June 2008 (UTC)