verso.co.nz

Wikis are great for presenting factual information, and Mediawiki is widely used for this. The only problem I’ve found with managing my own wiki is having to deal with all the spam that an open wiki site attracts.

My current Mediawiki site is my second attempt: this time around, it’s not a collaborative wiki, since it’s really there for my own personal publishing needs. And there are plenty of other collaborative wikis around.

Recently I’ve been playing with ideas around how Mediawiki could be used to implement a simple adventure game. Partly because I enjoy playing with the software, but also because I’m always keen to find ways to include problem-based learning into my professional development activities. So I spent a few hours developing the Learning Design Challenge.

It’s primitive – my first thought was to include a graphical component but I’ve decided I rather like the text-only format. Something to do with the relative ‘imaginative openness’ of text for the reader: maybe that’s why graphical novels are only a small part of the fiction market.

I’ve abandoned the idea of including objects that individual users can pick up etc – this would require a major coding effort. And the whole point of this is it’s very low-tech and very easy to implement!