http://wikieducator.org/Online_manualOn Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 04:54, < joyce.mckni...@esc.edu> wrote: > I have a lot of essays and things on human services and community organizing > that I would like to put into my wikieducator pages in a sort of book form, [...]
Since it is a wiki, there are several ways to approach it. I'll start the discussion with a couple of points, but the low "ceremony" nature of a wiki means that even if you start down one path and decide it isn't "working," it is generally not that difficult to reorganize later. There is a lot of "Just do it" about a wiki. There are collaborators that take pride in helping to organize and format, which helps too. I think there are probably two parts to your question: getting the material into WikiEducator and organizing it there. The wikitext format was inspired by the text conventions that many of us used to write email in the 80s and 90s. If your existing material is mostly text based, it may be simple enough to use a manual cut-and-paste scheme from your favorite editor to the WikiEducator text boxes. If you use OpenOffice or Microsoft Word, you can use the OOo Converter<http://wikieducator.org/Special:OOoConverter> that is in the navigation Toolbox. It will accept an .odt or .doc format document and do a "first pass" conversion to wikitext, leaving a copy in your user area on the wiki. There you can polish the formatting and/or move it to the desired place in the wiki. (The converter has not been completed to handle embedded graphics, which still must be done by hand... but it is a great way doing the first pass of importing already authored material, all without having to install any special software on your local machine.) There is also a plugin for modern versions of Microsoft Word<http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=12298#Overview> that will export to the wiki, but I've not tried it and read very little feedback about how well it works. And finally, WikiEducator has a quite complete scripting interface that would allow someone to write a tool to import other formats. In the wiki, there are a variety of ways to organize material. One basic concept that is used a lot is a "portal page" which serves as a main landing page for a project (examples include the Empire State College page<http://wikieducator.org/Empire_State_College>and the eXe project online manual <http://wikieducator.org/Online_manual>). These pages often use a project-specific Mediawiki template to build a navigation header that highlights the contained subject areas, each of which is often a "subpage" (the basic wiki page name followed by a "/" and the subpage name, mimicking a hierarchical directory structure). If it makes sense to organize pages in a sequence, there are also Prev<http://wikieducator.org/Template:Prev>and Next <http://wikieducator.org/Template:Next> templates to allow the reader to click through as if they were pages in a book. To organize the material into a "book <http://wikieducator.org/Help:Books>" for printing or export, the *Add wiki page* link in the navigation sidebar allows grouping pages into a larger ordered collection that can itself be saved as a specially formatted wiki page. But the most important organizing feature of WikiEducator is the category<http://wikieducator.org/Help:Category>system. Each page in the wiki can be tagged as belonging to one or more categories (*e.g.* Biology <http://wikieducator.org/Category:Biology>). This provides the most flexible method of grouping pages according to their content, improving the ability for users to discover material of interest rather than necessarily following the authors' prescribed sequence. I'd suggest starting small and experimenting as you go. Jim OER Foundation P.S. We've been having regular Google+ hangouts<http://wikieducator.org/User:JimTittsler/OfficeHours>on US Thursday evenings (and there is another special one starting in about half an hour). If you'd like to chat about options or WikiEducator mechanics rather than swapping email, please stop by. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
