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@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@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Emma Duke-Williams Sent: 07 September 2007 14:12 To: air-l@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.
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