Curr.wiki

Curriculum Maps on Wiki

• Does the wiki space for these maps have to be flat or can it be hierarchical?

If I understand your question, the curriculum maps can have hierarchy. If a teacher wants to add depth to their curriculum map, they can just create a new page, probably in some clearly delineated format that you will need to decide, and insert the link. If I have misunderstood your question, please elaborate.

A good lesson in saying what I mean ;-). I meant in a directory-type structure, so that the "curriculum Maps" could be like a folder in a bigger space so that Larry (or whoever) could assign write permissions to the whole folder for faculty-only as opposed to having to do something individually with every file. The question also gets to the file-naming issue below, where it would be nice for each course to have an associated folder that had assessments and such in it rather than having to have all those in one flat space.

Now that I don't know about. We'll all need to do some research on that. I really don't know how the files are stored behind the scenes. I wonder if we created maps.sjs.org if we could handle security for the entire site that way. We'll just have to research and experiment.

• • If flat, restricting editing access may be a pain
  • Does creating a different namespace solve this issue?

I don't think so. What are your thoughts?

I haven't done enough wiki creation to know. I just saw that there are different namespaces that can be searched and in perusing the help saw that there are administrative things that can be done on the server for people to add new namespaces, so I just wondered.

On the other hand, I saw a setting "$wgLocalDatabases - Other wikis on this site, can be administered from a single developer account," which implies that curriculum-map wikis could be in a separate wiki from general student wikis. That might be desirable?

Yeah, your second paragraph was what I was thinking. I think we want a whole separate site that we can do security on.

I like your maps.sjs.org idea running a separate wiki, which seems like it might be the easiest way to accommodate several needs at once.

• Can we search for exact matches on strings (analogous to a search-string-inside-quotes on Google)?

We need to look in to this.

• I assume the file name for linking to other pages in the Wiki doesn't have to be the same as the link title in the wiki you're editing, but that's the default. If it does have to be the same, things are going to get cumbersome since (almost) every curriculum map will eventually have links called "tests" and such...

That is why you/us will need to come up with some format that teachers have to abide by. I would imagine that the course name will have to appear in every page title. I envision something like AP Comp Sci Assignments, AP Comp Sci Tests, AP US History Papers, etc.

drat. This is another good reason, btw, to have the initial work done by a single person because maintaining/expanding something already set up should cause less confusion than many, many different people all creating it.

Exactly. If we have a temp going through and converting all of these, then the naming structure can be set and the forced. I like your idea of a temp doing the work any way, but this is an added advantage.

• We need to enable embedded math formulas

Can you provide a link on how to?

This (from Manual:Configuration Settings) seems relevant:

"TeX

To use inline TeX, you need to compile 'texvc' (in the 'math' subdirectory of the MediaWiki package and have latex, dvips, gs (ghostscript), and convert (ImageMagick) installed and available in the PATH. Please see math/README for more information.

   * $wgMathDirectory - The file system path of the directory containing LaTeX math images.
   * $wgMathPath - The URL base of the directory containing LaTeX math images.
   * $wgTexvc - Location of the texvc binary.
   * $wgUseTeX - Enables the use of <math> (TeX) tags.

"

Thanks. Remind me in a week and I'll take a look at this and get it installed to see how it looks.

• Another question that's just come up: it would be helpful to have a common image/media space available in our wiki for uploading images without needing to put in an external link (I discovered this when needing to insert some images of matrices in a sample linear algebra quiz).

Yeah, that is something Dan requested. Lori investigated it a little and we just need to do it once things slow down!

--Draulston 08:25, 18 August 2008 (CDT)

--Jeff 10:41, 18 August 2008 (CDT)

--Draulston 12:26, 18 August 2008 (CDT)

--Jeff 21:56, 18 August 2008 (CDT)

--Draulston 07:20, 19 August 2008 (CDT)