[pmwiki-users] Security and Home Page URL

Daniel dkml at xs4all.nl
Wed Apr 1 06:36:19 CDT 2009


Lane Lester schreef:
> Here's my first post as a PmWiki user. I'm the sole science teacher at a

Hello Lane,
I am also a science teacher at a private school in the Netherlands,
giving Computer lessons. I installed Edubuntu as a server, and the
students are working on laptops in a LTSP network. It is a very stable
system. Costs are minimal, because the laptops are all over-aged
second-hand.


I installed pmWiki, because of its groups-structure. There is an open
group called 'Student', where the kids can write their projects; a group
called 'Book', where teachers write abstracts about their lessons, which
is read only (and write permission for teachers). This group is
developing into a tiny 'wikipedia' for the students.
And there is a closed group (teachers only) for daily reports
(WikiCalendar Cookbook), called 'Staff'; and a semi-closed group where
the progress of the scholars are noted (no grades are given in this
school, just individual progress-reports) .

I am running this for about a year now, and the succes is overwhelming.
First it was *very* hard to convince the teachers to stop producing huge
amounts of office-documents but to put everything in the wiki, but now
they are slowly understanding the concepts of a wiki and hyperlinks,
everything is now entered in the pmWiki.

The student part is open, and at first much of the the work of students
was damaged by others (by inserting dirty words, and deleting stuff). By
daily checking of AllRecentChanges, and then the history of the
vandalised page, by IP-number is was easy to trace the vandal in
question, and restore the original work. Vandalism soon stopped, and now
the students are aware of the concepts of collectivism and cooperation.

A big issue is security. Adequate protection from the internet, and
regular backups are essential.

My conclusion: I worked (and am working) with many wiki brands, but
pmWiki is really ideal as a general school-wiki.

I am happy to provide more information about the project...

-- 
Daniel Kropveld
http://www.kropveld.net (also pmWiki :) )



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