Brad’s Ve-learning project

As noted, there are numerous wikis around, & we basically wanted something free, hosted & relatively WYSIWYG.   Ultimately, looking at the offerings, it would be preferable to have our own, with corporate badging, some pages lockable, & a whole lot more functionality, but at this stage we are just testing the water.

I looked around for some comparisons.  I found the Wikimatrix ( http://www.wikimatrix.org/ ) useful to some extent, cutting the possibilities back to a dozen or so.   A bit of a subjective run & my list came down to four: Seedwiki, Jotspot, pbWiki & Wikispaces.

We’ve used Seedwiki once before in the library.  It was pretty basic, & there was an obvious problem when we were all working on different pages & hit ’save’ - each update resaved all pages, so it had to be updated sequentially.  I’ve also had a play with JotSpot.  It again seemed pretty basic, & what you get as a freebie doesn’t seem well explained.  Suggestions of a limit of 5 users & 10 pages, limited appearance options, & a layout that seemed dominated by nav sidebars & titles didn’t seem to have user appeal (N.B. Jotspot is finding its feet again after having just been bought by Google – so it must have something going for it).   Robyn had given pbWiki a run, but had some usability issues with it.  I set up trials on all of these as well as Wikispaces (via Edublogs) which promised full – functionality & no ads – but it didn’t quite work out that way.  I also had some issues with pbWiki, primarily appearance & a tendency to reformat my layout at each save.  So it ultimately came down to Wikispaces, which had a cleaner layout & readability. 

Ultimately, however, if it is decided to proceed I would consider an upgrade to a paid, domain based corporate item, which would also open up the field considerably.

This one will be at http://horttafe.wikispaces.com/