SMART10 - publish (read all 2 entries…)
SMART10 - problems of success?

Problems of success?

The introduction of the wiki has gone much better than I’d dared to hope. There’s been no resistance whatsoever, no complaints, misunderstandings or anything negative at all really. The revised introduction method ran smoothly, there’s a steady flow of useful edits being made and now the COP members are talking amongst themselves about how to make best use of it, what to do with innaccurate information, how to identify themselves there. In other words they have comfortably adopted the space as their own, which is exactly the intention. So I can now take on the role less as facilitator and more as an ordinary contributer whilst also making observations about the relationship between wiki and COP.

So that’s a very nice situation to be in, for once. What do I do with it?

Help! I don’t have any problems to reflect on!

Going back to Bob Dick’s hotseat, he said of my early proposal – “I hope you find some way of publishing the eventual outcomes. I think many people will be interested in your experience.” So now I am starting to think about how I can publish my little success story so that I can pass on the positive lessons learned and perhaps help others to adapt some of the findings to their own situation if it has any parallels.

I’m not sure that the assessment product is going to be the best vehicle to do this with, although the intention of the AE tool is probably that it should enable publication of findings. It occurs to me that meeting the assessment criteria and publishing clear findings are two very different writing tasks, although there should be some overlap. Is there any previous experience of undergraduate research publication?



Comments:

Undergraduate research

Hi Andy – I personally don’t know of any other undergraduate research published in this way (that doesn’t mean to say there isn’t some or course – the www is a bit place :-) I think the key is that the section called findings is a clear summary so if the reader wants they can skip the rest and just read your findings.

I’m not sure you have to have problems to reflect on – you could demonstrate criticality by thinking of other contexts where your findings might be useful or where the process might not work as well…

onfac, comprac

I suppose it’s the format, and authority from evidence which would be all new to me. If I can get it right then I’d take it to the online facilitators forums to see if anybody wants to confirm, contradict or learn from my experiences. See how far it can be generalised. I’d like to see some examples of small-scale published research that are orientated towards influence rather than assessment.

Assessment

It’s a shame isn’t it that we have to have assessment at all? I can’t think of a better way though to get someone through a degree…if we could do that…

Are you talking about talking to other online facs for this AE?

next project

No, not for this AE, I think I’ve got enough to do already. I’m thinking how I can make the AE assessment product also serve a purpose as a report which can be shared with the onfac cops as part of the next phase, which would probably have to be for the ILM 2 I suppose.

ILM2

Yeah- I agree you have enough to do. Seems crazy you’d have to do something different for assessment then what you actually need. Maybe you could do what you need and then we could look at the assessment criteria and if there are gaps then we could think of another way of covering them – eg a separate bit of writing or a conversation between us or …..

Ultraversity wiki?

Could you write a bit about why the Ultraversity wiki experience has been so different – just a thought?

Another problem of success - hosting fees

If the traffic using the site keeps up at this pace I’ll be needing to upgrade the account already. It seems to have used up a third of the 0.5gb bandwidth per month already and the mysql database is restricted to 15MB with the current wiki taking up 5.

in order to try and postpone this I have

  • removed the flash animation from the homepage which was hogging the most bandwidth for a single file.
  • added a robots.txt file to exclude /wiki/ from those search engine who obey it.

animation

I never liked that animation anyway :-)
Seriously though what will you do if the wiki continues to grow at its present rate or even faster?

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Robots.txt

Yes it is a bit drastic. Try typing “cider” into google and the main ukcider site is number 1, well it is today it bobs up and down a bit. So people can find that and then go from there to the wiki for now. It’s just that I don’t like the thought of all those spiders regularly going through all the history revisions and maintenance pages thrashing the server. There’s a page about this on meta-wiki http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

Ideally I’d like search engines to list the genuine contents pages but I don’t understand how to do the ‘pretty URL’ thing yet. Do you?

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