Uganda/L4C/Lesson Notes/Day Three

= 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