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CITES Wiki

This page contains information about the educational technologies supported by CITES Academic Technology Services.

Log in to the CITES Wiki

The CITES Wiki is located at: https://wiki.cites.uiuc.edu/

Click the Login link at the top right corner of the page. (The text entry box is a search field, not a login form.)

About the CITES Wiki

Wikis are powerful, web-based editing and collaboration tools, capable of supporting individual researchers and small groups, large courses, or entire departments and units. The CITES Wiki service supports teaching, research, and departmental web-based collaboration and outreach, using a 3rd-party software called Confluence. The Confluence wiki system is quite flexible, allowing for a wide variety in the layout and look and feel of a particular wiki space; this is achieved by a choice of built-in templates and a "theme builder," enabling wiki owners to further customize their own space. The CITES wiki service provides many other features, including blogs and comments, sharing of indexed file attachments across pages and users, and sharing and exporting of pages to email, print, Adobe PDF format, text, and HTML. On our campus, the Confluence wiki system has been used as the home page for web-based courses and departmental web sites, as a collaboration tool for research teams and student project groups, and as a communication and content management system for campus professional units.

To get started with our Confluence wiki service, please request a wiki space, and review our online documentation:  "Getting Started", "Basic Help", and "Frequently Asked Questions"

Definition

One simple way to think of a wiki is as a web page with an "edit" button that anyone can click and begin writing and editing, without the need of a word processor or other software. Wikis are web-based and they make writing and editing text easy and collaborative since they have a very simple text editing mode, as well as the familiar word processing buttons: one can select a bit of text and hit the bold, italic, indent, or any of the other many formatting buttons. Wikis improve upon more traditional modes of writing collaboration like sharing paper and document files since a wiki page is shared on the internet and easily accessed and edited online. (Confluence Wiki does not at this time permit simultaneous editing, however.)

There are free wikis anyone can try like Peanut Butter Wiki (pbwiki), Wikispaces (wikispaces) and BluWiki (BluWiki). Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous example of collective content produced via a wiki, with over 10,000,000 articles composed in over 250 languages; the "wiki" entry in Wikipedia is a good place to learn about wikis, and entries like those on Alfred Hitchcock, Hurricane Katrina, and Sequoiadendron, the Giant Sequoia, give an indication of the range and quality of Wikipedia. The widely popular Google Docs is in many ways a wiki-like version of the widely used Microsoft Office suite of software, but Google Docs allows users to collaboratively work on web-based text documents, spread sheets, and slide presentations.

Wikis maintain a history of edits, from the very first words to the final version, and authors can review, compare, and revert to previous versions of the wiki page. This is the primary way that wiki authors and administrators can guard against vandalism and catastrophic mistakes--they can simply revert to the best, "clean" version of the wiki document. As wikis have developed over the years they have added functions we take for granted from other web sites and programs:  use of hyperlinks, tables, images, media, as well as the customized layout that we see with carefully designed web sites.  Thus, the newest wikis can be considered web-based content management tools that facilitate collaborative content creation.

Educational Uses

As noted above, wikis can be used to replace traditional web publishing models.  With a wiki, a teacher or research group can maintain a course or lab web site without the need of special software or web designers and web masters.  Wikis also help co-instructors and professor/TA groups collaboratively communicate with and revise content for large enrollment courses.  Wikis are so easy to correct and revise that teachers report that they can fix typos and add announcements during class or while multitasking in the office--something that would be more difficult and time consuming with more traditional publishing methods. Student group projects benefit from wikis since they facilitate collaborative authorship. Any group project, whether for researchers or students, would find a wiki an improvement over the older options of sharing hard copy, document files, emails, and having to meet face-to-face for all work. With a wiki, a group can meet once, set some goals, and then be able to contribute and revise content collectively simply by having access to a computer with web access. 

While the real power of wikis is noticed during collaboration, wikis also allow individual instructors and students a great web-based scratch pad and working area, which might be more accessible and productive than having document files stored on one computer. Indeed, individual authors might find the easy-to-use, web-based interface of wikis more personally productive than traditional word processing options. 

Over the years many writing experts have noted that better writing comes from more writing, revision, and multiple drafts.  On our own campus, Joe Grohens of Writing Studies believes that wikis can even help inside traditional writing laboratories, where they can encourage revision, editing, and collaborative improvement of writing. In addition, instructors can take advantage of the detailed history of who has done which edits and drafts automatically maintained by the wiki for assessing student work and contributions to group projects. 

Issues

Instructional

Wikis have proven quite valuable in the professional world, and in CITES our Confluence wiki is used by many divisions and groups for various projects and tasks.  Wiki use for teaching, however, lags behind adoption among groups such as academic professionals. In part this may be due to the fact that many instructors who could use wikis simply use blogs, web pages, or course management systems instead. Blogs, in particular, lend themselves to more traditional individualistic publishing models, and make great journaling tools. While wikis are very easy at the page level, for an instructor who wants to adopt a wiki as her primary course site, wikis can be daunting since they are new and something of a blank slate in terms of layout and design considerations for a particular class. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for an instructor who wants to think about and work through her course design. Wikis also don't have two important tools found in course management systems: quizzes and grade books. With the clear and more obvious choices of tools and layout provided by course management systems like Illinois Compass (in some ways like unto cookie cutters for online courses), it's easy to see why most instructors and institutions rely so heavily on such systems.

We believe that wikis may, in fact, find earlier and wider adoption in academia among campus professionals and researchers and graduate students, than in undergraduate teaching contexts. Quite simply, collaborative written projects are uncommon in undergraduate course work. In the humanities, the lone author is still considered the standard mode of practice, while in the sciences, for undergraduates anyway, collective authorship is typically put off until graduate school and professional work. One hope we have is that wikis will facilitate and inspire undergraduate instructors (once they experience the power of wikis in their own professional work) to try more student group work that would be impossible to conceive or manage without the collaborative power of the wiki.

Accessibility

Wikis are, by nature, textual environments and, therefore, highly accessible. Of course images and media used inside a wiki will require the same enhancements to make them more accessible that any web-based content would need, such as alt-text tags and text transcripts. One powerful accessibility feature of our own Confluence wiki system is the ability for the instructor or wiki administrator to export all wiki site content into simple text, html, and PDF formats.  This is achieved very quickly with a few button clicks, and would provide the wiki content in any of a number of formats that might be more useful to any user.  

Technical

At the level of the single page and basic text editing, wikis are very simple to use.  Of course by adding many other web features, from hyperlinks to media to RSS feeds and specialized plug-ins such as Gliffy (a web-based diagram tool) the wiki system becomes ever more complicated, requiring more experience and knowledge to wield such tools. Wikis are fairly stable and our own Confluence wiki system is typically quick and stable. With its ability to revert to earlier content, wikis are one of the safer online tools in regards to protection of content. Access to our Confluence wiki is via AD passwords. AD groups of users and class rosters can be given access to wiki spaces. We are currently working on integrating our Confluence Wiki with Illinois Compass, which does not currently have its own wiki tool. 

Examples

  • Middle School Chemistry is run by Prof. Patricia Shapley of the University of Illinois Chemistry Department, with content developed from her undergraduate chemistry students. The site includes nicely done lessons on chemistry-specific and related topics such as The Chemistry of Batteries, Wind Energy, and The Greenhouse Effect. Middle School Chemistry highlights a very public, outreach website use of our Confluence wiki system.
  • ANSC 438:  Lactation Biology is run by Prof. Walt Hurley, with the Confluence wiki providing his ANSC 438 students with a web-based area for recording text and digital photographic observations of dairy cattle, a platform for student presentations on global lactation issues, and various other group work.
  • CS 519: Scientific Visualization is a wiki serving as a traditional course web site, with the added ease of collaboration and editing that wikis provide.
  • One reason we believe Confluence wiki will be useful to campus is that it is already enthusiastically adopted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, The Illinois Informatics Institute, the Computer Science Department, and CITES.
  • Algorithms and Theory Group in Computer Science provides a good example of a wiki used to support a departmental field of study, with information highlighting faculty, recent Ph.D.s, graduate students, and course offerings.
  • The Real-Time Systems Integration Research Group in Computer Science illustrates how wikis can be used to support research teams.
  • The ORCHID group in Computer Science is another research group using the wiki as a nice, public web communication tool as well as content creation tool for its members.
  • IT Pro Services wiki is an example of a support unit (CITES IT Pro Services) using a wiki as an outreach and coordination tool in their efforts to support the many decentralized IT support staff on campus.
  • Multimedia Users Group, another campus technology support web site based on the campus wiki.

Resources

CITES Wiki Help

Confluence Documentation

Research