The document provides instructions for a practical workshop on using wikis. It includes: 1) Accessing the course wiki and exploring its pages on wikis' history and nature. 2) Searching the library database for academic literature on wiki usage. 3) Creating a personal wiki on PBworks and setting up pages, folders, and links. 4) Adding images, widgets, and other users. 5) Completing a blog post outside of class about using a wiki to support the module.

1. Social media - WIKIS practical
Outcomes to aim for
• Access the course wiki http://ucdetoys.pbworks.com/
Have a look around – find the brief history of wikis page, the nature of wikis page
Try out group editing of pages, leaving comments, adding a page
• Try out a search on WIKIS in the new findit @UCD Library portal to see the range of
literature on wiki use in your subject area or area of interest
• Set up one a personal wiki using pbworks, with some content and structure during
the practical as outlined in the guidelines.
• The follow up work for your blog entry is also included here
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2. 1. The course wiki for the lecture
Access the course wiki http://ucdetoys.pbworks.com/
Link to Slideshare to follow the presentation
Check out the format of the workshop and what we will cover 4-5.30
Have a look around – find the brief history of wikis page, the nature of wikis page
Try out adding a page for yourself if you wish – this will just be temporary
Leave some comments if you wish
You should all be registered and have received a login but if not then click on forgot
password now and check your e-mail to get the password you need for your e-mail login
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3. 2. Searching for academic literature on WIKI usage
Go to the Library home page
Click on the e-resources tab in the top bar
Log in with your UCD Connect login
Options to search for wiki literature:
a. Go to Quick Search | enter the search term WIKIS | pick the quick search subject area of most interest to
you | click on search | see what results you get
You can filter the results e.g. by date using the right column
If you want to see if UCD has full text of anything available, then click on the Find it button and follow the
links provided there
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4. b. More serious searching of our online resources
Close any windows you have opened above down.
Click on the Subject Search tab
Pick your subject area of a subject of interest
From the list of the many online databases available, select up to 10 by clicking the boxes to their left (some
do not have these)
Then enter the search term WIKIS or if you wish something more complex like WIKIS and Education
See what results you get as before
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6. 3. Create your own WIKI in PBWORKS
General points to consider
You may wish to set up a wiki of your own in the future to support social, educational or
business uses. In a real life wiki there are these considerations
WIKI must have specific purpose
You need to create an initial appearance/design and also a starting structure
You need to have disclaimers and also clear guide on adding content, what vetting and editorial
control will be in place and so on
There will be vandalism of pages and spurious entries if your wiki is open for editing.
You will need to patrol the wiki if you are the administrator
Unlike individual blogs wikis are designed to be collaborative – consider these questions
• Where is it hosted? Local instance or remotely web-hosted wiki farm and if so which one
• Is there a cost to use it at all, or a cost to get better features and customization?
• How many levels of permissions can you have
• Security and reliability if any sensitive data to be included - the standard arguments for
hosting in-house—security and reliability—have been addressed by on-demand vendors
like PBworks. Hosted wikis can provide high-grade encryption, redundant data replication,
and full access controls.
• Online editing works how?
• Can you achieve a good visual appear with layout, colour choices and addition of your own
graphics?
• If it is quite basic, still check – can you easily get materials into the system e.g. Word files,
does it convert them on the fly? Can you export the documentation out?
• What are searching and indexing features?
• In case of disaster can you roll back to earlier versions of pages?
• Can you add RSS feeds and embed Web 2.0 content from other services into the wiki –
good widget support is increasingly looked for and common
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7. Pbworks
ACCESS SITE, REGISTER, CREATE YOUR WIKI
• http://pbworks.com/
• Note the features of the product and when ready click on the green Get Started button at the right
• If you see it, click on the 30 day free trial balloon next to the PBworks title at top left of the next page
• Under the Basic right hand column, FREE click on Select
• Select a name for your wiki – if told it is already taken try another one till you are OK with that
• As this is a demo only select Individual wiki type and choose one of the workspace types e.g. easy
website
• Enter your name, e-mail and a password
• Click on Next button
• Now go to your e-mail and find and confirm their e-mail so you can proceed to set up your wiki
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8. • Once you click on the mail link you will get a screen where you should alter the settings so that only
people you invite or approve can view your wiki and only those invited can edit it.
Tick to say you abide by the terms and conditions and then click on Take me to my Workspace
• Your new WIKI and the front page will now be seen, ready for enhancemen
ALTER SOME SETTINGS
• Click on Settings in the right panel top area
• You can alter the title, add a description and alter the e-mail if you wish – if you change these click on
Save button
• Click on Colors in the left panel. If you wish, change your colour scheme and click on Save colour
scheme button (changes are quite limited in the free version)
• Click on Home to go back to the home page
ADJUST HOME PAGE DESIGN
• In this system each page has a view tab and when you want to edit the page you shift to the Edit tab,
do that now for the home page – it has a lot of default text on it which you will not want.
• You now see the editor panel and can adjust your home page
• For now mark up and then delete all the default text on this home page so it is blank
• Add something for yourself e.g. Your name as the heading and then body text “This is a test wiki
using pbworks” – or anything you want.
• Try out the tools in the editor to alter font, size and colour of the text if you like
• You can add tags for the page at the bottom – click on Edit tags and indicate subject of this page e.g.
home page, introduction, launch pad and then save. It is a good idea to add tags to all the pages you
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9. create in a wiki to express the subjects covered on the pages. You can see a Search box in the right
hand column and the more trouble you take to tag your wiki pages the more useful this will be.
• Click on Save – your edits are stored and you are back in the view-only mode. Save regularly to avoid
disaster.
• Go back into edit mode on the front page
Further home page edits:
• Insert a hyperlink of your choice, for example:
type in Library website, highlight that text and click on the hypertext link (globe and chain link). You
see that you can use this tool to link the highlighted text to:
other wiki pages, an e-mail address, wiki folders or external URLS
• On this occasion choose URL and then key in the library website URL www.ucd.ie/library , or your
example. Also click to have the URL open in a new window, then click on OK at bottom of the pop
up window to save this. You will see “library website” appears now on your home page as a hot link
– these links only work once you save and leave the Edit mode..
• Go back into edit.
Add another link to a new page within the WIKI – there is now a quick way to add links to new pages
and create them in one go.
Type in another line “Extra wiki page created 1”
Highlight this and click on the globe and chain again. This time you want to link to another new page
on the wiki so leave the type of link as PBWorks page, leave it set as New page, alter the name of the
new page to My first new page and click on Save. The system has now created a skeleton new page
for you.
• Now you are in view mode click on that new page link.
As you only have a skeleton there the first time you do this you must create the page properly so click
on Create Page now:
You go in to edit this blank new page – put some text on it and save it.
Go back to the home page and you will now have a proper link to your new page – this is one way to
build up pages as you need them when the wiki is developing
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10. ADDING IMAGES
• Go to edit the home page again. Position the cursor on a new line at the end.
• In the right column there are two tabs when editing. Pages shows you all the pages on your system.
Click on the other one Images and Files. This is where you can upload images and files to your wiki
and then put links to them into your pages e.g. upload images of your choice, upload ppt or word files
and link to them on wiki pages.
We will just insert an image from a website for now to your home page so click on images and files
and then choose Insert image from URL .
• In the pop up window you now get key in one of these (or do a google search for wikis, limit to images,
pick one you like and paste in the URL to the pop-up window)
http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/poll-results-wiki-use.jpg
http://blaugh.com/cartoons/060920_dyslexic_wiki_kiwi.gif
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~khealy/wiki2.jpg - you will have to re-size this one a lot if you pick
it as it will be very big at first.
The image will just appear directly on the home page now – you may need to move it about a bit
For real use it is better to save an image that is marked as free to use locally, get it to a good size and then
upload it to the wiki before using it. Just using an URL is a bit hit and miss in terms of size and legality.
• Click on save at bottom left of the page to save your images
SWITCH OFF POP UP HELP BUBBLES
A range of pop up help windows may be appearing in your wiki as you work – to save pages as favourites, to
let people know about new pages etc etc. These could be useful in real life but for now just indicate not to
show these messages any more as they occur
CREATE ANOTHER COUPLE OF PAGES
• You have already created one new page which you started when editing another page and decided you
needed a new page
• You can also create a set of new pages independently, if you plan and map out the shape of your
WIKI in advance. Let us say you now plan 2 new pages for working on seminar 1 and assignment 1.
• Click on Create a page in the top right area
• Give the page a name “seminar 1” , and then click on more options to see more options
• You can see that there are various templates you can choose to determine the layout of the new page –
try one if you wish
• Now click on Create page
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11. • Then you are in the editor as before and can add some text of your own and save the page.
• Repeat this – click on Create page and create another new page for “assignment 1” and save the new
page
• You will see that lists of your pages and your folders is beginning to build up in the right hand panel
– you have your home page, your first new page and now 2 more for assignment 1 and seminar 1
• Note that you can also click on View all pages at top right to see a listing of all that are so far in the
system in alphabetical order with editing details
USE FOLDERS TO ORGANIZE
• In this system you can keep your pages organised by putting them into one of a set of folders.
• Navigate using the right panel list of pages to Seminar 1 page (click on unfiled items to see all your
pages not yet in any folder)
Click on my first new page Put this page in a folder in the right panel
Then as we have not folders uyet, pick “Choose a new folder” and give the new folder a name in the
popup window e.g. General pages
• You see that the navigator panel in the right column now adjusts to show your new folder (click on
Back to go back to the start of the navigator structure)
• Navigate to the pages seminar 1 and assignment 1 and put these into a folder called Coursework in
turn and see how that works
• Once a wiki reaches any kind of size these folders plus tagging pages to provide a keyword search
option become very important. The front page is also commonly used to provide a table of contents
for users to see what is in the wiki.
EDIT THE SIDEBAR
• As well as the navigation and edit tools the right panel as a sidebar – click on Edit the Sidebar and do
something about this
• Typical uses for this sidebar would be to provide some USEFUL WEB LINKS, or show some
relevant youtube videos.
• Delete all the default text for now
• Add in text to say “WIKI bookmarks”
• Use the globe and chain, choose URL and put in http://delicious.com/ucdetoys/all-wiki-links as the
link
• Save that and see how the sidebar looks now.
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12. ADDING OTHER USERS - OPTIONAL
You can click on Settings at top right and then Users in the left column under “access control” to add people
to edit your wiki with you.
But note there is also a quick way to do that provided in the right hand column. Add a colleague now if you
don’t mind people sharing with you for the rest of the workshop or add rosalind.pan@ucd.ie
E-mails will reach these people welcoming them to the wiki
INSERT SOME EXTRA GADGETS AND FEATURES
• Open one of your pages into edit - click on “Insert plugin” from the editing dashboard and various
choices present themselves that you can explore
• Click on office applications
Then pick powerpoint slideshow
Click on launch Slideshare
In slideshare do a search for WIKIS
Pick one of the slideshows that come up – any one will do really
Click on its title
Take the code from the Embed field and then paste that back in the wiki window
And click on preview to make sure it works ok
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13. Click on OK at base of the window if a ppt appears OK – you may have to move the plugin window about a
bit to see that on the screen
Back in your wiki page a big green square appears – click on Save and you will see the embedded powerpoint.
• Follow a similar process to find and embed the code for any youtube video about wikis that you like –
you can make some colour scheme choices etc before you get the embed code
FINAL LOOK AT FEATURES AND EXIT
• Note the option to get a printable layout of any page in the wiki
• Click on the front page and then click on Page history – to the right of the page titles in each case,
easy to miss this
• You see the various old versions of the page, and you can compare versions to see where the changes
have been made
• Note the Recent wiki activity area at bottom right where you can see which of the contributors have
been using the wiki most recently
• Note the RSS feed option for any page if you wanted to get a notification by RSS whenever there was
an edit to the wiki
• Click on Sign out when ready
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14. 4. TO COMPLETE OUTSIDE THE CLASS
The entry in your blog for WIKIS
Take a look at the content of the WIKI for the workshop
Review the presentation on Slideshare.
Consider the practical work you did in setting up a wiki.
Follow up a few of the delicious bookmarks
On the basis of this, write a blog entry of about 200-300 words on how you think we could make more
use of a wiki to support this module in future years and why you think it would work well or if not why
not.
Include one link to a wiki or website of relevance to what you say.
Include a link or embed one youtube or slideshare presentation related to wikis
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