1. Personal Information

This is a bit of info about myself and my individual and collective projects related to tiki.

I'm researcher and lecturer at the Ecology Department of University of Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain.

I'm involved in a project of testing the use of wiki in teaching at university level, as well as other 9 lecturers from two public universities.

Right now we are running the project, since we got funding from the Catalan Government. We'll test from september 2004 to july 2005 the efectiveness (or not 😊 ) of wikis for group work writing paper works for subjects in experimental sciences (Biology, Environmental Sciences and Medicine).

A more detailed explation of our project can be found at (only in catalan, so far): http://uniwiki.ourproject.org

We do our best for promoting free knowledge in our university.

We also use tiki as our web portal http://gclub.ub.es

Talks in which I've cited or talked about results using Tiki:

July 8th, 2005: "Collective Creation in the last 20 years", in a Summer Course at University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, entitled "Art, Science and Technology in the last 100 years". In Catalan and a very nice Video from Creative Commons in Spanish: (Wiki - Tiki Slides - Pdf)

• See also the OpenOffice Impress presentations (or pdf version) of the oral communications at the congresses or meetings which I've been able to attend, to show some of our results, etc.

(formerly known as Infoespai.org )
We are also using tiki in Infoespai cooperative, promoting sharing resources related to information among individuals and collectives that works for the Social Change. We use tiki as our main tool for collaborative asinchronous and distant work. See it in action here

1.8 is done (100%). 1.9 update is in standby lately (give us a hand! 😉).
Drop us a line at: xavi at moviments.net

I've recently joined edu.tw.o as admin with Francis Steen, and we are seeking other people to help reactivating and gathering the efforts spread all over the globe using tiki in the educational context. See more infromation there: http://edu.tikiwiki.org

I designed some courses for learning Wiki (http://gclub.cursos.ourproject.org/Curs+Wiki), and another for introducing into administering a Tikiwiki site (http://gclub.cursos.ourproject.org/Curs+Wiki). Both courses with wiki (html) and pdf documentation, in Catalan, so far.
By Autumn 2006 a new course will be held: "Admin. Tiki sites - II" (intermediate level).

I've also tought related courses on using collaborative tools from free software for teaching and learning environments (in Spanish, held at university of Lleida, in Catalonia, Spain: http://gclub.ub.es/hcl)

Other courses might be prepared upon request.

2. Learning Management Case Study Xavidp

Introduction to UniWiki case study

( Check also the information at my personal page in tw.o )

• All the information of our case study in the UniWiki project is available only in catalan, so far (you can use the free web translation services from University of Alacant ("Torsimany" project), at: http://www.torsimany.ua.es/) .

• Test computer tools to help students and lecturers to cooperate writing documents for the learning/teaching field, with an increase of the efficiency and ease of developing their common tasks at university.
  • In the case of the students, we are testing whether they improve their efficiency to write group reports.
  • We we'll use for "efficiency", the marks of a report divided by the amount fo time invested to finish it; and compare it with blank cases (half the randomly selected students of the same classes to whom we will not allow them use the tool).
• We got funding from the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society from the Catalan Governement in Spain.
• We also got a little bit more funding (and support) from the Institue of Education Sciences in our own University (http://www.ub.edu/ice/), for doing research with the use of Wikis as tools for tutoring the students individual or group work asinchronously (september'04-september'06).
• Project started in January'04 and ends in September'05. September04 we'll start using wikis
• More information, in the project's homepage: http://uniwiki.ourproject.org

So far we are interested in tesing:
Wiki

• a Wiki, and we'll probably use the one from tikiwiki.org 😉 (at http://uniwiki.ourproject.org)

Web Folders (webdav) + Open Office .org (OOo)

• Web folders (using dav or webdav protocol) combined with Open Office suite version control capabilities.

Btw, very interesting the work done by Javier Reyes about integrating DAV support within Tiki!!! (see TikiDavDev )
Most of the teachers offered wiki support for the group work of their students. Some of us, also offered support for using OOo+WebDAV.

• We have been offering some Wiki (with Tiki) and OOo+WebDAV trainging in different free courses for students (and everyoine else interested that fits in the computer room 😊. And we plan to give some more Tiki training (wiki use, and Tiki admini). If interested, check (and monitor 😊 OpenTikiwikiTraining .

Members

• Click here

Sujects in which we'll try tools such as wiki

• Click here

Problems we have found, so far

• While evaluating our students group reports, in wiki pages, we lack to be able to see all changes made by a single author (already reported to LearningManagementSystemDev ).

Publishing about Wiki use in Education field
(in descendent chronological order)
See our file gallery with all our comunications there (either in pdf or OOo format)

1. "JORNADA ESPIRAL 2005 - Free and Innovative Educative Applications of the Information and Communication Technologies: resources and experiences": Comparison of methods for collaborative writting for teaching and learning. Xavier de Pedro Puente. Departament of Ecology. University of Barcelona.
   • Date: June 11th, 2005. Place: Barcelona, Espanya. URL
   • The results to the initial comparison among some computer tools to ease the collaborative writting of document were shown: Wiki, Web Offimatics (OOo + Web Folders or Webdav) and BSCW, respect to not using any specially designed ICT tool to ease such collaborative writting. The Wiki is pointed out to be the best option, for most of the requirements at writting documents for teaching/learning at university.
   • Written Communication, in CATALAN and .pdf format (134 Kb)
   • Oral Communication, in SPANISH:
     • .pdf format 1x1 (1.77 Mb)
     • .pdf format 4x1 (279.97 Kb)
     • .sxi format 4x1 (1.14 Mb)
2. Oral Communication in Edutec2004 Conference: http://edutec2004.lmi.ub.es/. Held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, in Spanish for the spanish speaking edutacive community around the world. Friday 19/11/04.
   • Title: Dedicación temporal del alumnado a trabajos en grupo usando Wikis en entornos libres de aprendizaje colaborativo u Ofimática Web: análisis de un caso en ciencias experimentales.
3. I submitted a comunication for a International Conference (held in Girona, Spain, 30 June-1,2 July'04), mainly for Spanish speaker community; see http://cidui.upc.es), where I showed the uses of Wikis, as tools for collaborative writing in the education field (for students and lecturers), mainly University, but could also be used in Secondary School and Colleges, or course.
   • You'll find there information about the poster we're presenting at a conference, etc. You can also find some of the base information which we used to prepare the poster but in wiki format at: http://uniwiki.ourproject.org/tiki-index.php?page=ComunicacionAbreviadaCIDUI2004Wiki (in Spanish, with a link at the bottom for the automàtic translation to English)

Collaboration proposal for other conferences or papers in journals
Well, if you, reader, are interested in publishing your findings of the use of a wiki (tikiwiki or not) in the area of teaching and learning, please contact me at xavidp (a) bio.ub.es. I'm interested in publishing results of the use in education, since they will help to improve my CV and hopefully stabilise my position at university of any education centre (which I would love to 🙄).

3. Communications in Congresses

I've been able to submit some communications in Congresses about Wiki usage and other web tools (mostly using Tikiwiki, by the way) in higher education.

Their abstracts and links to wiki-slides & full text can be found here:
http://edu.tikiwiki.org

4. Teaching "Wiki" usage and "Collaborative Web Sites" administration

I've been engaged in the last years in teaching Wiki usage and also teaching how to administer collaborative web sites, such the ones based on Tikiwiki CMS/Groupware.

More information can be found here: OpenTikiWikiTraining

And in the portal sites I used to support my teaching:

2004

http://uniwiki.ourproject.org

2005

http://gclub.cursos.ourproject.org

2006+

http://moviments.net/cursos

5. Involvement in Tiki Community

Even if I'm listed (as xavidp) in http://cvs.tikiwiki.org, I'm not a php coder, but I contribute with translation, and eventually, some very small hacks or fixes (if I get the clue how to solve easy things). I used to code in fortran for marine ecology research, but that was all and some years ago.

I'm mostly involved in:

• writing at the forums (from time to time, when I find time to help other people)
• bug reporting and RFE inserting at http://dev.tikiwiki.org/tracker5
• documenting at http://doc.tikiwiki.org (I seem to be at the Editorial board lately...).
  I helped a bit to produce Tiki19beta.pdf from its .odt corresponding file, filled with content from the Documentation structure.

6. Tiki hosting at moviments.net

I'm a member of a non-profit cooperative in Catalonia (Spain) called Altercoms (http://altercoms.org), where we offer hosting of web sites, including Tikiwiki, of course. 😊.

The server is called http://moviments.net

Most of the information for the public is mainly in Catalan, but if you are interested in being hosted your tikiwiki there, as many other people have done already, contact me.

That's all for now.

Cheers,😉

Xavier de Pedro (aka xavi and xavidp)