How digilit empowers digital literacy with XWiki

20 Dec 2019 5 min read
Written by the XWiki Team

As software providers, we are constantly thinking about the happiness of our users. Whether it's the XWiki product itself, the services or the support we offer, we want to be at the top of the game for you. To do that we implement features proposed and voted by our community, use the best tools so that all XWiki-related experiences are smooth, run regular customer surveys, and request feedback whenever we meet you. This was the case with digilit, a project that aims to bring digital literacy in an "analog" way. For that, their need was to create a wiki that would gather information and teaching methods on the issue and would act as a collaborative platform for all parties involved (organizers, managers, trainers, participants, and others). 

XWiki Cloud was a great fit for this project, due to its adaptability capabilities. We take care of the wiki hosting, upgrades, maintenance, and backups, so the digilit team can focus on getting things done.

We met with them at Cloud Expo Europe and we're happy to learn more about their use of XWiki and plans for the future. Below is an interview they gave us after the event. 

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THE CHALLENGE

"The expected result of the digilit project is the design and deployment of a wiki to exchange educational practices and contents about the main issues of the digital transformation. It is used as a collaborative tool between the partners (Germany, France, Spain, and Romania) in the framework of a European Erasmus + project. The main purpose of this project is to exchange practices between project managers and trainers who work in the field of adult education. It shall provide information on particular issues, e.g. artificial intelligence and algorithms, data protection, work 4.0, on-line collaboration, etc. It is addressed in priority to low-skilled learners and aims at empowering their digital literacy. Particular attention is given to the social and political aspects of the digitalization and to the key questions that are useful to understand the social and economical on-going transformations and help to take part in a rational debate about the technological issues. It shall also provide didactical inspirations for trainers in adult education. This includes gaining and providing competences on how to create and maintain a wiki. 

The wiki is developed by the participants so that they can understand the concepts that are underlying the design and the development of a wiki as a collaborative online tool that can also be used in presentation courses with trainees. The idea is to develop a community of practice (available only to current users). The wiki is for the moment developed as a prototype, but it will be opened at the end of the project to show the result of our common work with the purpose of building a knowledge basis with other contributors who want to participate."

THE SOLUTION

"The digilit wiki is developed in the XWiki Cloud. We have chosen this solution after having benchmarked several options: implementing on a server our own wiki with MediaWiki, joining a wiki farm on YesWiki, and more. We have chosen XWiki because we are partners from different European countries and the question of language is very important, it has to be developed first in English, as English is the common language with which we are working. Secondly, it was also important to have a user-friendly interface. It was not possible with Wikimedia, because our users are not so used to the marker language and they have not the time to go deep into the technological issues."

THE RESULTS

"Each of the European partners produces his own part of the content that will be available on the wiki. We also meet regularly to design the wiki together and imagine how it could be used as a collaborative online tool, helping to design learning activities for adults that improve their digital literacy on social and economic subjects. After the kick-off meeting in Berlin, the second project meeting has taken place in Paris from the 3rd to the 5th of July 2019.  It was the opportunity to have together an intensive design thinking session, with a lot of inputs, workshops and a big brain-storming in order to decide together the structure of our wiki. Then we had a week of intensive work together in Focsani in Romania from the 18th to the 23rd of October, a Learning, Training and Teaching Activities session where we exchanged a lot about such contents as artificial intelligence, history of digitalization and cyberbullying.

We are very happy with the XWiki solution and we hope our wiki will expand, even after the end of the Erasmus project!"

Do you have a similar project or want to know more about what we do? Let's talk!

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