The Observer, October 14, 2005
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 7
Case Wiki and Blog provide new communication channels
Unveiled earlier this year, the Case Wiki, a collaborative website at http://wiki.case.edu, was developed to create a space in which Case faculty, staff, students and alumni could share information about university activities, courses and organizations, among other things.
The Wiki can be accessed by the entire world, but only people with a Case network ID and password can edit articles. Discussion pages, however, can be edited by anyone. Case users can log in to the system to contribute to the Wiki by following the login link at the top of every page. Users can search topics to find related articles on the Wiki. In this way people can add to existing pages or create their own pages with new topics.
Wiki developer Jeremy Smith, an employee of Case's Information Technology Services in the Middleware Engineering Group, began creating the system last May and is responsible for project oversight and management. Greg Szorc, a computer engineering student who also works for the Middleware Engineering Group, is in charge of software and systems engineering.
The Case Wiki is different than the Case Blog because articles on a blog site can only be edited by the authors, while the content of the Wiki is intended to be collaborative. Only members of the Case community can edit and make changes to pages.
In an academic sense, Smith felt students needed an alternative to the registrar's course catalog for online class descriptions.
"I just remembered back to when I was a student and looking up course descriptions on the online catalog. The information was useful, but I would often turn to other students who had already taken the courses to find out more," Smith said. "It just made sense to me that students should be able to convene in one area and input their own collective knowledge of a course so that future students would have it all at their fingertips."
Sharing information about courses is just one of the possible functions of the Case Wiki. Users can document their activities, collaborate on projects and track the progress of independent studies.
Smith has enjoyed working with the Wiki system. "I like rapidly deploying small, poignant services and seeing how the user community ends up taking to the service. If the service ends up failing, if nobody uses it, no big deal, it just wasn't a good fit for the campus community. On the other hand, if people keep using the service testing its limits and using it in a variety of ways, then all the better," Smith said.
The Case Wiki has been relatively well received, although it is still in its infancy. "I really like the new Wiki system. My Economics 102 class used it to set up study groups," junior Oliver Small said.
The innovation has made communication between students more convenient. "I think the system will be very useful because it will allow students to communicate from their rooms," senior Halley Briglia said. "More students are likely to share their opinions if they can do it on their own time."
Another student, however, thought that the Wiki system may be superfluous. "For course information, students can use the course catalog, and student organizations and other groups can stay in contact through email," said junior Bethany Craig.
Currently, the Case Wiki and Case Blog are run from the same server. System administrators plan to set up separate servers for each program, along with a backup server in case on of the programs should fail. However, due to budgetary concerns, a timeline has not been set for this change.
The Case Blog can be accessed at http://blog.case.edu/.
