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Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins
5/14/2008
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.
A compelling feature of Confluence when he selected it several years ago, Snowden said, was its ability to handle user permissions. "We could see that it would work with our grouping system, and we'd be able to set permissions so that one person can view, another can view and edit, another can add attachments, and one group can administer the space," he explained. Now, a number of other wiki tools offer that capability as well.
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