[Air-L] wiki tool suggestions?

Alex Halavais alex at halavais.net
Fri Sep 7 09:20:40 PDT 2007


Hi, all,

I've been trying to do some summary of the recommendations here:

http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=Wiki_Hosts

I'll second endorsements of phwiki & socialtext.

Contrary to Elijah's position, I'm perfectly happy to leverage
commercial services for my teaching. This semester I am using
Facebook, Wordpress.com, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pipes, and Second Life as
pretty central organs for my courses. All of those suffer many of the
faults Elijah describes: closed source and data-locked.

It's not that I don't care about the commercial intrusion, I suppose
it's that I am not as sanguine about the university as a
non-commercial space. Even when I was teaching at a public university,
and especially from the perspective of administering programs, the
university environment is far from non-commercial (even when it is
non-profit). I get much more squeamish about $100 textbooks and
required use of Blackboard than I do with making use of commercial
hosts.

Alex




On 9/7/07, Robert Worthington <R-Worthington at dfid.gov.uk> wrote:
> I've used both www.socialtext.com and Confluence
> (http://www.atlassian.com).  The former offers a free hosted service and
> is very easy to use.  I particularly like the big "edit" button at the
> top of each page - you can't make it much easier than that.
>
> Confluence is a little different from the more typical, open-ended wiki
> structure.  New pages are organised hierarchically, with breadcrumbs
> assigned automatically.  I think this gives users more of a feel for
> where they are in the wiki, which can be confusing if you are used to
> more traditional navigation structures.
>
> Hope that's useful.
>
> Rob
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Emma Duke-Williams
> Sent: 07 September 2007 14:12
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] wiki tool suggestions?
>
> I personally like Wikispaces, which, by default, has a discussion board
> attached to each page. That could be good to ensuring that discussions
> between students about changes, are tied to a particular page, rather
> than getting lost in other discussions/ emails that they're having.
>
> I've recently been to ALT-C - a conference in the UK for Learning
> Technologists. One of the papers (
> http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=1220
> ) looked at how students were using wikis etc. They found that students
> found the group work aspects very difficult, and the most common way of
> creating a wiki was for them to divide up the content and create a
> "page" each. Reference was made in the presentation to a different
> session, when "Wiki etiquette" was discussed (not sure which session, as
> i didn't go to it). They made the point, however, that they'd spend a
> lot more time discussing how much work most students need to help them
> effectively use a wiki.
> (The presentation doesn't seem to be linked to from the page. Others
> that I went to were, so hopefully this one will appear at some point)
>
> I know that when I had students creating wikis, they were definitely of
> the "I'll do that page & you do that page" variety. So, getting them to
> understand what a wiki really involves is, I think, going to take quite
> a bit of work.
>
>
> --
> New URL: Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/
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