World of Wall sneak peek

I’ve been working on a project lately that relates somewhat to my earlier post about who owns student work. In addition to exploring alternatives for storing student work online, I have also been looking at where I can put my teacher stuff online. I don’t want to bring that into my personal blog so I had been using some free services (wikispaces and wordpress.com most recently) to publish my stuff (and some student stuff). Being of a geeky nature, I’ve decided that after trying school hosted and free web tool approaches, it was time to create and host the whole thing myself. My professional teaching/learning/resource site is called the World of Wall. It consists of a WordPress blog and a wiki (using the mediawiki software. It’s what powers Wikipedia amongst others, although I don’t expect to get that big). The two are tightly integrated so that wiki content can be embedded within the blog posts. I found this approach to content integration from a screencast by D’Arcy Norman, and I owe him a big thanks (and maybe lunch/coffee next time I’m in Calgary) for his help getting this going. (D’Arcy’s blog is a great source of ideas and technical how-to’s for projects like mine – you should check it out if you aren’t already).

So – where to from here. I’m not 100% sure, but sometimes great things can happen when you’re not sure what the result will be. The plan thus far is that I’m going to put notes, links, assignments and media resources into the wiki. I’ll use the blog to publish the wiki content over the course of a semester so that it will give a sense of order to the wiki content. I can also use the blog for course announcements and reminders of deadlines. I’ve used this approach to blog based content management, without the wiki as a knowledge repository, with a long since defunct blog I used for my Computer Networking and Computer Science courses. It was an effective approach and I’ve been meaning to revive it. I think this project is a logical next step to build on earlier projects and I’d welcome any ideas that anyone might have on how to use or improve it.