Wiki Assignment

Introduction

Like the EdGames blog, the EdGameWiki is an integral part of the course. It's a place in which we will build a common knowledge base about educational simulations and games. Wikis are persistent, so, as with our blog, it's a way to pass knowledge from one year's offering of the course to the next as well as to interested viewers in the wider world outside the class.

What's a wiki? A wiki is a system for creating hyperlinked documents that are open to being revised by all participants. That might sound chaotic, but it's really a powerful idea for knowledge management. To get an idea of what a wiki is, take a look at Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia with tens of thousands of co-authors. Wikipedia has extensive coverage of games, but not much on the educational use of games and simulations.

We'll be doing something similar to Wikipedia but narrowly focused on the domain of this course.

Requirements

During the course of the semester, you must make at least 20 paragraphs to the EdGameWiki. These may be distributed among 3 to 10 different entries (separate wikipages). That is, you can write 10 separate entries with 2 paragraphs each, or 3 entries with more information detailed in 6 or 7 paragraphs each, or create 8 entries with 2 paragraphs each and add 4 more paragraphs to entries started by someone else, or any other combination that adds up to 20.

Each paragraph...

  • consists of at least 7 sentences organized around a single topic sentence;
  • has a header that explains what the paragraph is about (e.g., Introduction, History, Early Career, etc.);
  • creates dangling wikiwords for every word in the paragraph that might conceivably become an entry in the EdGames wiki at some point. (e.g., in a paragraph detailing the ARCS model, you would surely include a link to JohnKeller as a wikiword anticipating that that would be a separate entry.)
  • is embedded in an entry that focuses on one important person, place, thing, event, fact, concept or principle that is squarely within the domain of this course.
  • is embedded in an entry that contains at least 1 link to some other existing entry in the wiki.

Other requirements for this assignment:

  • At least 2 of your paragraphs must include an image file, sized no larger than 300 x 300.
  • External URLs should be added at the bottom of the entry as described in the October 4 class.

Content

What should your contribution be about? You are the target users of this resource, so the first driver of the content should be what interests you within this domain. With any luck, the diversity of your collective interests will result in a wiki that broadly covers the field and answers the kind of questions an instructional designer/game designer would have.

How do you find the data for your contribution?

  1. Take a look at the Links page on the navigation bar for the course.
  2. Look back through the archives of the EdGames blog. Your predecessors found some great pages.
  3. Look at the other blogs listed on the right side of the EdGames blog.

What kinds of entries should you make? Just to assure that there is variety in your contributions, think about the categories of things one might write about. Here are some possible categories:

  • People (e.g., Chris Crawford, Garry Shirts)
  • Games & Simulations (e.g., Math Blaster, Wff 'n Proof)
  • Issues (e.g., gender differences in game preferences; violence in games)
  • Theoretical constructs (e.g., Keller's ARCS model, Csikszentmihalyi's Flow concept)
  • Practical concepts & categories (e.g., frame games; agent-based simulations; play-by-mail games)
  • etc... More categories will emerge as we go.

Your contributions should not all be of one of these types. Try for a variety of these.

Due Dates

October 11, 2004. By this date, make a posting to the Wiki Forum on Moodle listing the names and a short description of 10 topics that interest you. Look at what's already posted first so that there are no duplications.

After that time, start searching the web and the library for the information you'll need to make your entries. For now, write them in single Word document. On October 11, we'll devote class time to the mechanics of actually posting them in the wiki.

November 8, 2004. On this date your contributions to the wiki will be tallied and assigned a grade. This assignment counts for 25% of your final grade.

Return to the EDTEC 670 page.