Academic Productivity

Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

 

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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About the author: Jose Quesada wanted to be a matador, an acrobatic pilot, or a painter, but found those activities not demanding enough, so he chose an academic career. He secretly hopes to orchestrate a system that produces papers without any human intervention (particularly, his).

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:27 am and is filed under Resources, Socializing, Software, Web 2.0, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.