What has changed in Campus Pack wikis and blogs?

The design of the Campus Pack suite of tools, including wikis, blogs and podcasts has changed. This blog post offers a quick summary of these changes for the wiki tool. The screenshot below is also a clickable link to a short film detailing the changes.

What has changed: Campus Pack tools (wikis, blogs) in VITAL

So what has changed?

• New pleasing design, maintaining the same functionality.
  • More space, less clutter, for content creation.
  • List of pages moved from the right to the left under the new Pages button menu (area B in the screenshot above).
  • Admin settings in top menu now clustered under new Settings button menu (C  in the screenshot above).
• New content editor: faster loading, easier media embedding, easier table creation and support for copying and pasting from Word.
• Comments and latest activity now at the bottom of the page (area A in the screenshot above).
• Simpler editing:
  • Easier editing of page hierachy.
  • Simpler page deletion.
  • Simpler page history comparison.

(Click on the screenshot above to watch a five-minute eLearning Unit video to see the changes in more detail.)

For written guides, see:

• Official guide by Learning Objects on the changes
• Guidance on using Campus Pack with Blackboard (VITAL)
• VITAL self-service FAQ on the Campus Pack upgrade

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Music study skills session – using wikis

The eLearning Unit has been working with Freya Jarman from the School of Music who runs a study skills module in music. In this module students construct group a website for future first year students using the wiki tool within VITAL/Blackboard. Freya has presented this teaching approach at last year’s Learning and Teaching Conference. This year, the first years students are doing the same with some slight modifications, for instance, groups are now not self-selected, but aligned to the personal tutorial groups.

It is always a pleasure to see Freya’s dynamism when teaching, which I had a chance to do when helping her show students the functionality of the wiki tool.

Screenshot of Polleverywhere, the online and mobile phone voting tool; as you can see it is easy to embed the live voting results in Powerpoint slides.

It was the first time we used the Polleverywhere software in the PC lab, which allowed students to vote on the best wiki sites they looked at as well as entering free-text responses as feedback on the wiki sites. All this feedback was then displayed in a Powerpoint file live (please see the image above). As we were in a PC lab, we did not make use of the mobile phone voting option: students voted via the web – but other staff at the university are already making use of this feature in large lecture classes with great success.

Freya is running a lunchtime session entitled ‘Study Skills Through Collaborative Enquiry: collaborative enquiry through study skills‘ on Thursday, 10th March 2011, you can book on this session via the CLL booking site.

We are always after case studies to show staff in our sessions. If you are using wikis for collaborative group work, please let us know via elearning@liv.ac.uk or contact one of the eLearning Unit team members, we would love to hear from you!

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For more information, please contact the eLearning Unit at elearning@liv.ac.uk