Category Archives: Announcement

WikiSym 2009 Talk: Understanding Learning – the Wiki Way

Authors: Joachim Kimmerle, Johannes Moskaliuk, and Ulrike Cress (University of Tuebingen) (Germany)

Abstract: Learning “the wiki way”, learning through wikis is a form of self-regulated learning that is independent of formal learning settings and takes place in a community of knowledge. Such a community may work jointly on a digital artifact to create new, innovative and emergent knowledge. We regard wikis as a prototype of tools for community-based learning, and point out five relevant features. We will present the co-evolution model, as introduced by Cress and Kimmerle, that may be understood as a framework to describe learning in the wiki way. This model describes collaborative knowledge building as a co-evolution between cognitive and social systems. To investigate learning the wiki way, we have to consider both individual processes and processes within the wiki, which represent the processes that are going on within a community. This paper presents three empirical studies that investigate learning the wiki way in a laboratory setting. We take a look at participants’ contributions to a wiki indicating processes within the wiki community, and measure the extent of individual learning at the end of the experiment. Our conclusion is that the model of co-evolution has a strong impact on understanding learning the wiki way, may be helpful to designers of learning environments, and serve as framework for further research.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Registration Opens!

The registration for WikiSym 2009 is open! Please register first on the wiki and then for the (physical) event, if you want to attend in person.

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The event registration is handled by the OOPSLA registration system. If you are only interested in WikiSym, you can shorten the event registration: Once on page 4 in the process, jump forward to page 14 to checkout.

We have previously published the participation fee schedule. Please note that early (reduced fee) registration ends September 17!

Thanks, and see you in Orlando!

WikiSym 2009 Keynote: Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site

WikiSym 2009, Closing Keynote, Tuesday October 27, 2009

Speaker: Brion Vibber (CTO, Wikimedia Foundation)

Abstract: Collaborative communities such as those building wikis and open source software often discover that their human interactions have just as many scaling problems as their web infrastructure. As the number of people involved in a project grows, key decision-makers often become bottlenecks, and community structure needs to change or a project can become stalled despite the best intentions of all participants. I’ll describe some of the community scaling challenges in both Wikipedia’s editor community and the development of its underlying MediaWiki software and how we’ve overcome — or are still working to overcome — decision-making bottlenecks to “maximize community throughput”.

Speaker bio: Currently CTO and Senior Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, Brion Vibber has spent his career since 2002 growing up with Wikipedia’s community and software development. He lives in San Francisco in his native California, but still misses the Florida sunsets from his time at Wikimedia’s original offices in St Petersburg.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Keynote: Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts

WikiSym 2009, Opening Keynote, Sunday October 25, 2009

Speakers: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research

Abstract: Visualization is often viewed as a way to unlock the secrets of numeric data. But what about political speeches, novels, and blogs? These texts hold at least as many surprises. On the Many Eyes site, a place for collective visualization, we have seen an increasing appetite for analyzing documents. We present a series of techniques for visualizing and analyzing unstructured text. We also discuss how a technique developed for visualizing the authoring patterns of Wikipedia articles has recently revealed the collective lives of a much broader class of documents.

Speaker bios: Fernanda ViĂ©gas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. ViĂ©gas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Both ViĂ©gas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Speaker Lineup

WikiSym 2009 is shaping up nicely; we’ll soon be providing a first glimpse at the program. For now, here are the confirmed speakers, more to follow:

We are very excited to have these speakers present at WikiSym 2009!

WikiSym 2009 Participation Fees

We are very happy with the interest in WikiSym 2009 and all the early travel planning. Here is the 2009 participation fee schedule. Registration will open in July, cut-off date for early registration is September 17, 2009.

Registrant type Participation fee
Early registrant $560
Early registrant, ACM member

$490
Regular registrant $650
Regular registrant, ACM member $590
Student

$275
Student, ACM member

$255
One day only $275

Paper Notification Deadline and Late Submissions

We pushed back the paper submission deadline in March/April by a week and hence we will be taking a week longer with the paper decisions.

Please expect the notification email on or around May 29th now.

On a related note, we are still receiving late submissions for posters, demos, etc.

WikiSym’s open community nature will allow you to present demos and posters in open space.

Submissions that were put in by the deadline and that have been accepted will be made available (and archived) in the ACM Digital Library as part of the WikiSym conference proceedings series. If all you care about is showing your work, by all means, please come by and don’t worry about submission deadlines! (If you have special requirements, please contact the (general chair, though.)

WikiSym 2009 Second Deadline: April 24th, 2009

Only two more weeks until the second WikiSym 2009 deadline! By April 24th, 2009, submissions for posters, demonstrations, WikiFest and Doctoral Symposium proposals are due! Please see the call for papers for more information!

WikiSym 2009 First Deadline: April 2nd, 2009

Due to multiple requests, we have pushed back the first deadline for WikiSym 2009 submissions (research papers, experience reports, workshop proposals) by six days from March 27th to April 2nd. We hope that this will allow everyone to better cope with multiple competing requests. For the WikiSym 2009 Call for Papers please see the wiki.

Name Change: Wikis and Open Collaboration

Web-based readers of this blog may have noticed a new extended title of the WikiSym site: We are now “the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.” This is to better express the breadth of work requested for and displayed on the WikiSym website, at the actual event, and in the proceedings.

WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, is broadly about open collaboration as exemplified by wikis, but not only by wikis. At WikiSym you can find the best of research and practice on processes, politics, philosophy, etc. of wiki-style collaboration, be it on blogs, wikis, and other social software. Despite the shorthand “WikiSym” this symposium is not narrowly about wiki technology.

Continue reading Name Change: Wikis and Open Collaboration