Tiki, between computer department management and pedagogical interactions.

I manage and animate a tiki powered website (started 08/03) for an applied art school (computer department), that's the actual subject of this page.

Situation

The situation I and my three collegues are facing is the following:

• 60 PCs, 80 Macs, many softs, different printers (A4-A0), different cameras (analogic and digital) different scanners, different servers.
• We have a photography, earthwork and windowing department, with a total of 300 students, 30 teachers, 30 guest teachers.
• People working in and out of school (photographers, for example…).

Why an educational portal ?

• the amount of different tools and ways of doing makes it impossible for everybody to know everyting.
• many classes are project-based in a very free-form: students have to plan their workflow and be aware of the technical aspects of it.
• each year, about 100 students leave the school, taking along the "recipes" they set up, and are "replaced" by another 100 students who need to be taught everything.
• computers are tools that require involvment and self-teaching, this idea may be contrary to some of the principles of "education".
• The hardware in the different departments is becoming more and more digital, whereas digital stuff was only in the computer department: that means many more hardware, many more interfaces, many more knowledges to grow and share.
• color workflow is critical in here, and not the easiest thing to setup in a system with different scanners and printers.

Achievements and solutions realized so far

• Wiki knowhow on computer uses.
• community news blog for events.
• technical news blog. very important: people feel so easily helpless with computer stuff and they have this (statistically wrong) feeling that computers crash more often than other machines. this blog tells them what's up, what's down.

Projects

• One of the reasons of our eductional portal is to provide to the users the possibility the set up internal online projects, would it be an image gallery showing the last visual works, collaborative redaction of interdisciplinary projects, documentation project about a rather peculiar subject not covered by the already supplied documentation, assignments and side-information online.

Concrete examples:

• 4 Groups of students of an Interdisciplinary project kept all their work on a wiki and teachers regularly visited and commented their work, this allowed flexible interactions.
• The student of 2 Pilot classes maintain "onboard journals" about their computer projects with screenshots and textual content.
• Teachers post the results of projects in galleries, inviting everybody to see it and feedback.

Where we go

I think the next steps will be to split the support and the online community, and make the whole platform ready for satellite projects that will require so gears and privacy.

Wishes

This wishlist is an addendum to the LearningManagementSystemDev wishlist, while i'm not sure wether i can add this to the official list.
in order of need!

1. WikiRoots (spacenames): a OneTikiManyWiki solution, with permissions for each wiki. that would really be great: we could simply open a new WikiRoot for each new project. see RFE: MANY wikis in ONE Tiki.
2. WikiSyntaxEverywhere : Naming any object (page, forum, blog, ...) of the site make it possible to call it from any other object simply by naming it! WikiSyntax has its flaws - but is genial and intuitive and mnemofriendly - and suffers from being restricted to the wiki.
3. Improved ImageGalleries and image browing and editing : i'm working on enhancing them on a more "portfolios idea"., some test site will soon be available.
4. have a decent WebMail. the actual webMail is quite cute but quite unfonctional. This really is a problem for we're considering to offer official school emails to all the students and teachers (with mailing lists for the departments, teachers, classes, ...) and we cannot think of not using a webmail integrated to tw (we're really into a integrated portal idea).
5. list users groups through a wiki plugin. (actually working on that).
6. rss feed customizing like which-info-goes-where and how-much.

Me

I was a poweruser, i tend to be more, learning that part of the game is to provide ideas bits of codes.