[Air-L] wiki tool suggestions?

elw at stderr.org elw at stderr.org
Fri Sep 7 12:23:00 PDT 2007


> 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.


I don't mean to suggest that folks not take advantage of commercial 
services when possible; far from it.  There are good reasons not to try 
to, for example, teach a class of 35 students how to install Drupal.  ;)

At the same time, it is critical that we remain aware of what we sacrifice 
by choosing to use particular services.  Some of the things we give up, we 
may wish to give up freely;  others, less so.

I think that it is vitally important that folks have a backup plan;  "what 
do I do if I can't get to my materials today?  tomorrow?  for the rest of 
the term?  ever?"  This stuff happens.


> 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.

I'm unfortunate enough to have seen things go painfully awry with regard 
to all three points you mention;  when they go bad, they're *really* bad. 
:)

--e



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