A Wiki For Desktop Tower Defense?

A few weeks ago I discovered the Tower Desktop Defense through a link I got from a post I received in my XWiki Watch feed reader. I tried it and quickly became an addict, experimenting with new strategies and playing styles. The next step was to try and take advantage of the resources available on the website to improve my gameplay.

The Current Situation

To do so, I have access to different kind of resources: the quick start guide, which spells the basic rules and behaviour of the game; players top scores (I'll let you guess what that page does); players ' mazes which shows what other players mazes look like and which score they achieved using it; and lastly a forum broken down in categories such as general chit-chat and tips and tricks.

What's Good And What's Less Good With This

There is a lot of info available to improve the way you play, which is cool. But the point is, going through all of it is somewhat painful. For instance, along with basic rules I'd like a page showing me examples of good and poor mazes with an explanation of why they are so. I'd like the knowledgeable calculus explaining why this kind of tower is better than that one clearly spelled out on a page rather than on 3 different forum threads. And so on...

A Wiki Solution?

A wiki would bring some underlying structure to all this available data while in the same time tapping into and reinforcing the involvment of the players' community. It would be easir for fans of the game to improve the overall documentation and discuss about various potential strategic moves. An user could record its own progression and its best mazes on its user page. The stories behind great scores could be told by those who achieved them.

In short, a wiki would give an expression space to members of the community which would be both more effective and more rewarding than the current system.
Flexible structure, community power, effectiveness through collaboration... DesktopTD, will you embrace the Wiki Way?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis and Strategic Mindmapping

What if your company's top management started throwing its ideas on how your company stands compared with its competitors, how well it performs with its clients and what are its potential strategic choices on a mindmap? I started playing with the idea after giving a try to MindMeister, a collaborative, online, shared mindmapping tool. What could it look like?

Collaborative Mindmapping

The idea of a mindmap is somehow as old as human brains themselves. Mindmaps offer a great way to throw ideas around, keep track and organize them in a flexible yet powerful way. Mindmapping software has been around for some time now, with good Open-Source solutions available amongst others. These softwares have traditionally been thought to be used by one single user who could then share his thoughts with other. The possibility of real-time collaborative mindmapping brings in a whole new area of potential in the way people collaborate together.

The Wiki Connection

Take this example: imagine your top management board sharing ideas about how your company is run, what are the main issues facing it, which strategic path it should adopt and so on. Now imagine the resulting mindmap being turned into a wiki, with one page for every node on the map. Last stage, open this wiki to all of your company's employees and see what could happen.

The Effects Of Collaborative Intelligence

I already argued that there is a strong chance that the people who have the best insights about your competitors and your field of activity are the people working on the front-line, those who are in touch on a daily basis with your suppliers and customers. Retrieving their ideas thanks to a wiki built along the lines of your company top strategic thinking and making an analysis of them could prove an invaluable communication and information gathering for the people who run your business.

Wikis and Mindmaps share a lot of properties. Using them in coordination could create amazing collaboration tools. What if?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis and e-learning

Thought to become a revolution in the way we teach and learn, e-learning has not yet achieved its full potential. This is due to a lack of understanding of the way people do actually learn. Using a wiki instead of traditional e-learning tools does make a difference. Not convinced yet?

How we do not learn

We (assuming that here "we" refers to us all human beings) do not learn by staring blankly at blackboards. We did not do at school, and we do not either while staring blankly at webpages. We do not learn either by reading ill-written content served in an ill-conceived fashion by a Flash applet. Last but not least, we do not learn while interacting with silly pre-programmed answers offered by a computer, however clever its programmer think they have been.

How we do learn

We learn through our active interaction with people and problems. We learn while we experience interest in the subject of which mastering we are pursuing. We learn when an emotional transfer occurs during the studying process. Which part of your physics 101 course do you remember today: the textbook readings or the fuzzy chemical reactions in the labs? This is what learning is all about: interest for the topic and self-involvement in the learning process.

Learning through a wiki

A wiki offers a platform for clever learning together. The interaction with other people (human beings, not machines) provides us with feedback and new insights. There is additional motivation too, created as a byproduct from the involvement within a community of peers and of area of interest. You do not feel the same emotional bonds for a computer than for other people (At the very least I assume most people do not). There is an acknowledgment of oneself as an human being worth of being talked, discussed and spent time with in the process too.

The core issue? The structure of contemporary e-learning does not match the way we do learn. Inversely, a wiki goes in the right direction since it promotes learning through interaction.


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis: The Next Step In Information Sharing

Contemporary education works around knowledge itself. Knowledge is often valued for itself rather than as a mean of achieving a given aim. In the same time, modern technologies give us access to more knowledge than one could ever have dreamt of decades ago. The shift is happening right now: knowledge is not the key, but rather access to the right information at the right time.

A Clever Database

A wiki is written by the very people who will be using it. A page about a given topic has many chances to contain all the relevant information about that topic since potential associations have been created by visitors to that article with the available body of knowledge. A wiki transforms raw information into a richer, more readily available and structured body of knowledge. It is an extensive and evolutive source of information. Specialised individuals can collaborate together better than ever before.

Coupled With Clever People

A wiki provides the structural through which users can collaborate and coordinate themselves easily. What is then the "perfect" user mindset? In this view, an user should be able to go and search for the information he is looking for in the rigths places rather than knowing everything by himself. Say, knowing how to access the right bookshelf rather than learning the full transcript of a book. Wikis push this trend to its limit. The relevant point is no longer in detaining knowledge itself, but in being able to draw the right connections. Individual specialization can be harnessed while minimizing its collateral negative effects.

Perfect collaboration?

The combination between intelligent users and a system that provides them with the structural basis through which tehy can interact and share together effectively open new perspectives for enterprise collaboration. The examples of Intelpedia or Pfizerpedia show how a seemingly hazardous move initiatedthe by an individual employee can bring value to the whole company. The viral nature of a wiki implies it spreading quickly. A wiki let us unleash the way we naturally tend to learn. Working together has at least found a meaning. Are you ready for this?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Why Wikis Will Revolutionize The Way We Think About Education

I realized a few days ago that the way education is currently provided to students around the world is becoming increasingly inefficient day after day. I read some time ago a paper that stated that the only thing that has remained still for the past 100 years is the classroom. This is true and really surprising.

The Classroom Concept

What are the main benefits of getting in a classroom? Obviously, grouping people in a place where they can be taught by someone with a specific experience in one field, that this person will try to communicate to his / her audience. Another feature of current formal education is the fact that the majority of it takes place before you are 25, and then abruptly stops. Does it means that you stop learning when you quit school? Or even that you are properly equipped for the tasks you have to do? No. The education you received was not personalized either, which means that in the bundle of knowledges you had to absorb a wide part will neither be of any use to you. Why should we go toschool and Uni for years without even learning things that are of direct interest to us? Wikis change this.

Lifelong learning?

Should lifelong learning take place in classrooms? Taken broadly, we are learning at every second of our lives. Learning how to do something specific, making connexions with what we already know, thinking baout new ways of doing things... Now with a wiki all those thoughts could not only be recorded easily, but at the same time be shared in a relevant space with people who could enrich their contents and their scope significantly. You do not need to be in the same place, at the same time anylonger to share with others. Now you can create communities of people interested in the same topic and start learning from one another in minutes. Boundaries are not a necessity. Free your knowledge!

Making intangible tangible

Most learning processes take place through interactions between people, not necessarily in a formalized manner. A wiki gives a place for the fruit of these interactions to be expressed and discussed with others. Little contributions from many end up in amazing results. You can teach yourself what you are interested in with the help of others who share your passion. Rating can take place through a pari assessment that understands comprehensively what you are trying to achieve and whether you succeeded at it. Within companies, it means that constant learning and formation concerns can be addresses much more effectivelly than ever before. Information flows and you have access to it.

Education and the ability to learn continuously are currently one of the most regarded assets in business life. A wiki will give your organization the power to pursue this objective effectively. Remember the World without Wikipedia ?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Wiki As An Open Point Of View On The World

A wiki lets people collectively transform a high amount of raw data into a useable and organized corpus of information. Most people have their own point of view about the world around us. Some of us even have more than one, depending on circumstances. But up to now there were no systematic way to transform those points of view into a coherent total.

Why Wikis Change This

A wiki gives a space for collaboration. Now you can get in one place all the content relevant to a given topic. With the help of Widgets you can now integrate content coming from various places and put it one one page. Our brain work by making associations between neurons. Now on a wiki we can all create relationships between bits of content and enrich them by linking them together easily, tagging them and retrieving their up-to-date content via RSS Syndication.

The Quest For Meaning

When searching on the internet, we are most of the time looking for an answer. Search engines are great, but sometimes do not turn up with the right answer. The same is true to a greater extent within companies: intranet are not meant to be easily searchable. The likes of Google Mini are starting to changing this, but even them cannot do more than automated search. The greatest benefit of a wiki in this context is that it lets people group relevant informaion together on one page (or set of pages).

Being Relevant

On a wiki, you can decide to give one page to every topic. This page will be enriched will all the content related to this topic. It will retrieve information from various different sources and be available at anytime, from anywhere. More than a reference sheet, the page will also be coherent: the content you will find on it is directly related to its title. Other potential meanings are listed and given pages on their own. How is that different from internet ? A wiki provides a place where information is classified following the needs of its very own users, where they can have a direct influence on every page. This is what 2-ways interaction means.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

9 Corporate Wiki Starting Tips

There has been some buzz running lately on various tech blogs, regarding the best ways to get "social-enterprise" tools adopted faster and more easily. When it comes to wikis, various tips and tricks are suggested (amongst which my favourite is "if you don not want to end up disappointed, do not start") but there is room left for another list. At least this is what I will be arguing by doing in the following.

Get Things Off To A Good Start

• Give your wiki a soul: this may look like an odd advice, particularly in a corporate setting, but it is maybe the most important one could ever give you. Think about any successful project you lead: which one did not include the strong sense of a shared purpose? Starting a wiki makes no exception.
• Refer to the wiki: if you actually expect your people to go and use the wiki, make is as well known as possible. Encourage its adoption through an intensive internal referral campaign. Clearly stating that you will not read any attachment which has not been uploaded on a wiki page is a good idea to begin with.
• Do not start from scrap: asking people to actually edit pages instead of only reading them is a concept weird enough to get to grasp with, do not add the burden of having to create your own pages (at least at the beginning). Think about putting most of the currently available material on the wiki and even start stubs for pages you feel like they deserve one.

Help Your People

• Train them: there is some hype going around, which basically says "one should be able to use any piece of software without training". ... How many hours have you spent figuring out how to use less than 10% of MS Excel potential? A wiki is not complicated to use, but one should always remember this does not mean that everybody was born knowing what to do with one. In fact, most people were not.
• Provide fast and relevant help: the one thing more annoying that a software that you cannot get to work properly is a software that you cannot get to work properly without knowing why. Whenever something does not go as well as expected, provide a resourceful help center. One that actually knows what your wiki software is, for example.
• Listen to your users: elementary? Yes. Done? ... When it comes to a new technology adoption, providing more support than necessary is a necessity. Feedback is always useful: it tells you what actually does not not work and makes user feel they are listened to. Tip: if you decide to take action from these premises, it is even better.

Keep The Wiki Going

• Go through the "start effect": after the buzz and enthusiasm following the launch of your corporate wiki, an after-shock state is likely to happen some way or another. This includes the 3-days period when no ones writes anything and the "what's new" page looks like your fridge. Do not be afraid to wait a little, things need time to get on the right track.
• Hire a "wiki gardener": during the beginning, information will be added in places seemingly chosen randomly on the wiki. To sort things out and give coherence to the whole, consider assigning this task as a mission to somebody. It will make a huge difference if the wiki can be browsed easily.
• Find out why this generic checklist did not work for your company: this would be my last reminder: every company is different, and implementing a coprporate wiki will hence trigger problems that are quite different too (depending on your enterprise culture, work habits and management staff...). Find out how a wiki could work for you, not how it ought to work for somebody else.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

PS: For those of you who wonder why I stopped at 9 rather than going all the way to 10, it is mostly because I felt like 10 was too short to provide enough advice on the topic.