Tag Archives: wikis

May 23, 2012, 8:00 am

Create Markdown Documents in the Cloud with WikiPack

Wikis are great tools to share and collaborate, but many of the wiki services are far from user-friendly, and sometimes you don’t want to share your wiki with everyone. If only there was a wiki tool that could create pages using the awesome Markdown language, and store the documents in Dropbox for safe keeping. Luckily, a new tool called WikiPack can do just that, and then some.

WikiPack uses Markdown and WikiWords to create a private wiki that is stored and accessed from your Dropbox account. The easy to use and powerful Markdown language lets you easily create and edit your pages without knowing any strange wiki syntax.

(more…)

November 16, 2011, 8:00 am

Academic Jobs Wiki Shortcuts

By Prof. Hacker

Academic Jobs Wiki screenshot [[This is a guest post by Scott Selisker, who is currently completing his first book as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the UCSB Department of English. He learned some stuff about the internet while designing features for the UVA Writing Program’s website, Redschoolhouse.org, in 2009. He is on Twitter at @sselisker.--@jbj]

This is the second of a two-part series on the Academic Job Wiki. The first post introduced the wiki and discussed the extent of users’ anonymity on the site, and the present post will discuss advanced features and shortcuts that can help you spend less time finding information on the site.

While the job wiki contains a great deal of useful information about the current status of most or all the job searches in a field, it can be tedious to navigate. Really tedious: the basic navigation option is to scroll down a very long page, pause at the sections of…

November 15, 2011, 3:00 pm

Using the Academic Jobs Wiki

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Scott Selisker, who is currently completing his first book as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the UCSB Department of English. He learned some stuff about the internet while designing features for the UVA Writing Program’s website, RedSchoolhouse.org, in 2009. He is on Twitter at @sselisker.--@jbj]

This is the first of a two-part series on the Academic Jobs Wiki. This post will introduce the wiki and discuss the extent of users’ anonymity on the site, and the next post will discuss advanced features and shortcuts that can help you spend less time finding information on the site.

Many ProfHacker readers will be familiar with the Academic Jobs Wiki already, either through hearsay or from its steady companionship through the long winter months of the academic job search cycle. For those who haven’t heard about it, the job wiki is an information-sharing…

September 20, 2011, 3:00 pm

Making Data More Usable With ScraperWiki

By Jason B. Jones

The great strength of the internet is also its weakness: There is So! Much! Information! out there–so much, in fact, that it can become hard to access. And not everyone who publishes the same kind of information, or information about the same topic, publishes it in the same way, or to common repositories.

It’s not hard to cobble together scripts that automate the collecting of some of that data. (For an introduction, see Julie Meloni’s epic, accessible introduction “Working with APIs: part one, part two, part three, and part four. Also, there’s my post on RSS scraping.) But if anything changes about the way the data is published, then those scripts no longer work well, if at all. What would be great, then, is if there were a publicly browsable collection of scripts that scrape APIs and websites, scripts that could easily be updated if something about the data changes.

Friends,…

July 18, 2011, 8:00 am

Wikipedia in Your Pocket – All Of Wiki and Wikihood

By Konrad Lawson

There are a number of apps out there now which allow you to download a mostly complete copy of one or more languages of Wikipedia. I use an app called All of Wiki for my iPhone which costs about nine dollars. I’ve also tried another one simply called Encyclopedia. They are both troublesome to get up and running and I ultimately only settled on the former when I concluded that, in its current update, it sucked less. Downloads of full dumps of Wikipedia in a particular language sometimes fail and refuse to restart without reinstalling the app, the developers decided various important pieces of entries are missing (footnotes, bibliography, tabular data, etc.), and sometimes the search feature is annoyingly slow. Your mileage may vary.

Ever since I have had it, however, I become quite addicted. 3G gives many of us the internet pretty much anywhere we go, and for the rest of us that are on…

June 2, 2011, 3:00 pm

Some Pre-THATCamp Suggestions

By George Williams

As I wrote last week, most of us here at ProfHacker will be attending one of the two THATCamps taking place this weekend. My bag is packed with what is probably a ridiculous number of essential geek tools, and I’m looking forward to the conversations and collaborations in the days ahead.

My advice to others either attending these unconferences or following along from a distance is to create a PBworks account–if you don’t already have one–so that you can contribute to the THATCamp wiki (the PBworks user manual shows you the basics) and to get a GoogleDocs account (GDocs support documents are helpful) so that you can collaborate in real time with others in the creation or editing of documents (see below for more).

For some pre-THATCamp reading (related to the above suggestions) consider the following:

“E-mail Is Not a Tool for Revision,” by Jason B. Jones

Using an online…

May 12, 2011, 8:00 am

Finding Sources with The Full Wiki

By Amy Cavender

A few weeks ago, I came across articles at LifeHacker and Hack College mentioning a web service called The Full Wiki.

I was intrigued. I often tell my students that Wikipedia isn’t a source that they should ordinarily use directly in their work, but that it can be a good place to get a quick overview of a topic. They may also find it helpful to look at the references an article cites.

The Full Wiki seeks to make Wikipedia more useful for students. You can see it in action here:

Some of the references that pop up go beyond what’s listed in the works cited section of the Wikipedia article, and may well be useful to students, as seen in the example below [click on any of the images below for a larger version]:

At this point, however, The Full Wiki won’t work for all articles in Wikipedia:

That’s to be expected, though, as the service is currently in beta.

After exploring The…

January 24, 2011, 3:00 pm

Teaching Extra-Large Classes and the Role of Technology

By Mark Sample

One of the realities of our economic hard times is that faculty are being asked to do more with less. The place where this hits many of us the hardest is our classrooms, where we’re teaching more students than ever.

In some cases we face chronic enrollment increases, in which class sizes might expand by one or two students progressively every year. In other cases we face acute enrollment hikes, in which a class that was once 27 students is suddenly capped at 40 students, a 50 percent increase in class size.

I faced the latter scenario in 2009, and I face it again in the Spring 2011 semester, teaching a class that is substantially—even dauntingly—larger than my usual classes. Both a year ago and today I find myself pondering the same questions: How should my pedagogy change to meet this new teaching context? Or should it?

My classes are student-centered, hands-on, and…

January 21, 2010, 6:00 pm

Tending Your Digital Gardens: In-Semester Maintenance

By Jason B. Jones

If you spend any amount of time using a wiki–or, for example, services such as Flickr or delicious, where you can tag and organize your material in a variety of different ways–then sooner or later entropy will tend to set in. It can be hard to find things–or, in a classroom setting, your students find themselves either hemmed in by what’s come before, or they can’t find what they need to move forward. (Or, in my instance, PBWorks search is basically useless, because there are so many individual pages in the wiki.)

My basic reaction to this problem is to sit and sob a little. Ok, well, maybe not sob–but certainly it’s more soothing to hit refresh on NetNewsWire than to clean up 80+ pages of Flickr photos, or 3 years of PBworks pages. The task just seems overwhelming.

Wiki folk have a metaphor that’s handy to think about: wiki gardening. You cut a little…