Blogs from WikiToLearn

 

 

Hello everybody,
Back again with “Wiki, what’s going on?”

I’ve decided to give the title “WikiToLearn is magical” to this post because recently we had an informal dinner with some members of our community and it turned out that I am able to do magic, especially card tricks. Are you wandering if this is somewhat related to our project? Well, look at this video to discover it. Our project is strictly linked with magic: for example when you are trying to study and your pen vanishes you can do nothing but use WikiToLearn. So yes, WikiToLearn definitely is a magical project – lol.

Anyway, things are getting more and more serious: tomorrow, mainly with the core team, we are having an extremely important discussion (clearly open to anyone who’s interested) in which we are going to program our work for the incoming months. We want to be ready to rock during the next year: that’s why we are going to set up well defined tasks, start focusing on them and do our best to complete them. Probably we are going to talk about the implementation of the visual editor on our site; the developement of a new, more user friendly, interface; technical features such as templates, badges and the “user journey” feature. I know that I always say it, but still we have to work hard: we are determined, so let’s rock!

Good things are coming: stay tuned!

Bye,
Matteo

 

Hello everybody,

Once again “Wiki, what’s going on?”. Today I’m here to give you some updates on our work with the WikiToLearn community.

First of all our activity of the last two days: the participation sprint. On Wednesday Daniele (@Mte90) came to Milan for a two-days sprint on a very important theme for us: participation. What can we do to improve the way we work? How can we help new users participating and feeling involved? These, and many others, are important points to us and we’d like to come up with good decisions and conventions to go straightforward to succeed.

During the first day we had a great brainstorming and we have discussed important points on how we intend to plan our work. We have realized that both internal organization and new users involvement have some lacks that have to be fixed: communication channels, user experience, “taskization” and detailed documentation to help people not to be lost on our website.

In this second day we have discussed different workflows for new users; we have tried to understand how to better set our internal organization and way of working. We have also had an important discussion to try to clarify how to engage successful students that do not feel involved in the community. We have also wrote down all the ideas that came up, trying to find their pros and cons: this is the (more or less) the first time we try to take notes live, during a discussion. I think this is an extremely useful strategy and we can adopt it during our future discussions.

There is another thing I’m proud of: remember the course I was writing of which I talked you about in the last part of “Wiki, what’s going on”? Well, I’m happy to announce that now the online course and the pdf book are complete! 🙂

 

 

Bye,

Matteo

 

 

Hello everybody,

I’m here to give you some updates on our work with the WikiToLearn community and, since I like this idea, I was thinking that “Wiki, what’s going on?” could become a nice section of our blog where to give updates on our work and things like that.

 

So, let’s start: recently the promo team had a (mini) sprint where some important features were discussed. Mainly we focused on participation: both on how to involve new users and on how to enforce the community structure. In my opinion, this is an extremely important task to be accomplished and I appreciate all the efforts we are doing to come up with an effective organization. We came up with cool ideas, such as local groups, “wiki-thons” and others but now it’s time to test them. The editors group is working hard as well: review of the contents, definition of an internal structure and writing new contents are our daily work. Actually I’m not part of the tech group, so I can not give you any update but the certainty that our guys work day after day to improve ux experience, to a better and always effective infrastructure and to solve other problems of which I have no expertise to talk about.

 

For today it’s everything. I’d like to conclude this post with something I am pretty sure about: if you ask “Wiki, what’s going on?”, “working hard to improve” can be a good answer!

 

Bye,

Matteo

Hello everybody,

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, so I’ve decided to write a brief post to present recent updates in our community.

The past week we had the pleasure to meet Daniele Pannozzo (@Atakanz) – he has a personal blog where he already talked about it… take a look 😉 – who came from Rome to Milan in order to meet the rest of the community and to work all together for a couple of days. I really appreciated this experience because it made me realize how much close our community is!

We often say that “WikiToLearn is growing faster and faster”: nice to hear it! Keep in mind that this also mean that we have to work hard both from the technical and from the organizational side, and that’s what we are doing. We are working on how to solve some organizational problems related to multiple versions of a book, we are improving the way new material from .tex sources is imported and we are getting closer and closer to new users both on our website and on our communication channels.

Our social channels (mainly Facebook and Twitter) are giving us good feedbacks on what people think about us. Recently “Wired ITA” and “Il Fatto Quotidiano” (one of the main Italian newspapers) wrote about us and our adventure. Day after day I realize how good we are doing and how hard we have to work to succeed: the show goes on, wikitolearners!