History: aw1l 3.1 Results

+ In first cycle students (for example, Functional Ecology-ECOFUN, Health and Environment-SIMA), we have detected that:

+ * They have difficulties to organize themselves in work groups. <br />* They have difficulties to synthesize the information, since it is easier for them including information from digital sources than adapting it to their context and synthesizing the sometimes too long texts.<br />* First cycle students learn quicker and accept better the new methodology than those of the second cycle, even if this varies among degrees.

+ On the contrary, in second cycle students (for example, “Evaluation of Environmental Impact”-AIA, “Applied Ecology-UB”-EAUB, “Applied Vegetable Physiology”-FVA), we have detected that:
+ * In general, they can organize themselves much better than first cycle students and they have previous experience in working in teams (distributing work, assuming roles inside the team and taking profit more efficiently of the effort and time invested).
+ * Many of the teams have not been of new formation but the members already knew each other and had collaborated or are collaborating in other assignments or subjects of the degree
+ * They are people with resources that tend to know already how to 'move' themselves at university and use the available resources quite efficiently
+ * Depending on the details of size and type of assignment for work groups, the Wiki methodology has been little or very accepted:
+ ** In some cases, the grade of acceptance of the Wiki methodology has been very low (subject FVA) partly attributable to the fact that they are in their last year of the degree (their priority is to finish, they take many subjects in some cases, and they don't have time to learn novel methodologies, especially if they have other tools that they manage well enough, even if they lack some of the needed features for group work that Wiki technology includes)
+ ** In other cases of subjects in last course, they found positive and negative aspects (subject “Applied Ecology, Environmental Sciences, UAB” - EAUAB). In the positive part resides the facility of distance interaction among them and the fact that, at all times, there is only one “good” copy of the document. It is also positive the fact that the students manage to learn the new technology with little training and information (expressly) given by their lecturer, since their handling of the Web technologies seemed enough for this type of applications. In the negative part resides the fact that they were not too used the Web environment of work, and that the final format for the document was not Web format but paper format.
+ ** Nevertheless, in the case of “Evaluation of Environmental Impact”-AIA, of third course, the students have accepted very well the new Wiki methodology, since for the type of work that they had to do and for the big size of the work groups (15 persons), they were foreseeing that it would facilitate very much the work to them. This way, Wiki has meant a tool and methodology very well valued by students for the comments in class at the end of the course (from both those who could use it, and also from those who had to use the traditional methodology).

+ Lecturers have the impression that if students could have work at an standard Office software environment (either Microsoft or ))OpenOffice((, for example) which could work agile and quick enough for the group work, the success had been much more important. However, the speed of using standard office documents combined with Web folders (Webdav protocol) was not good enough for students nor lecturers, after a pilot experience that was deployed at the early stages of ))UniWiki(( project, besides many other handicaps for the web office methodology use in educational scenarios with the current development of technologies (De Pedro 2005a).

+ On the student side, there where a total of 229 surveys and 223 self-recording tables collected of invested time (divided in methodologies and subjects in Table 3).

+ {SHEET(id=16)}Table 3. Surveys and self-recording tables handed in, for each work methodology and subject.{SHEET}

+ # ''"I have not had any problem to communicate with the members of the group since that we are together in the class and taking profit of the same spare hours is very helpful"''

+ (2)a Wiki-like computer technology ("__Wiki technology__", according to definition and initial prototype of Wiki from Ward Cunningham, 1995).

+ Thus, a "__Good practices with Wiki methodology__" proposal can be suggested, after the experience acquired in UniWiki project, including 3 generic plus 7 more ))TikiWiki((-related items (even if other similar Internet platforms, such as Mediawiki, dfWiki, eWiki, etc, would need similar procedures to perform these common tasks when editing documents through Wiki methodology):

+ * Make single Wiki pages to be as small and divided in sub-pages as possible, in order to avoid the attempts of simultaneous editions of the same content (remember that, up to present date, no Wiki engine can cope with merging the changes from simultaneous edits of the same page; a Concurrent Versions System -like tool would be needed instead). In case of attempt of simultaneous edition of Wiki pages of TikiSheets, Tiki would warn the user that another using is editing this content before him/her, and haven't saved or canceled edition yet.

+ # In case of common graphs (pie chart, multi-line, multi-bar, stacked bars), TikiSheet feature can generate graphics (figures) directly from the web spreadsheet in Tiki, and you can dynamically include them inside Wiki pages (changes in spreadsheet data will automatically update the figures shown in Wiki pages). <br /># In case of need of more complex or different graphs inside Wiki pages: <br />+ Generate them with your favorite software (there are very nice free software tools to create them), and you need to convert them to bitmap images (like photos; formats *.jpg, *.png, or *.gif), either by exporting the graph as such through your software, or by taking a computer screenshot when the image is viewed and cropping it to your needs (different procedures depending on the operating system in the computer). Once the image is in the hard drive, then select it and press Upload picture from within the Wiki page edit form. <br />+ In order to include many graphs generated from external software programs, an easy procedure to convert all of them from graphs in ))OpenOffice(( Calc or MS Excel (for instance), into single images on disk could be to save the spreadsheet as html - Web page. Image files should be either in the same directory as the generated html file, or in a folder of the same name as the html file, depending on the program). Then they can be uploaded as images or photos to the Wiki page as previously described.

+ * Saving as web page on hard disk from Internet browser is needed again, selecting as Full Web page (or similar option, depending on the browser).<br />* Then a conversion of the html document on hard disk to common office document format is needed. From ))OpenOffice(( (OOo) , an extra step is needed and thus it will be explained here to illustrate a possible procedure. Open the html document with OOo (everything will be inside a single-cell long table). Select the whole content from inside the single cell of the table (the full contents of your document), copy it and paste it into a new (blank) OOo Writer document. Save this new document as text document (either ".sxw" or ".odt"). Then you can already edit the document as wished in that Office suite with normality (modifying styles and formats if needed, including a paginated initial index, header and footer, numbers of pages, etc.).