Brad’s Ve-learning project

I guess one of the early brushes with this stuff I had was a while back while looking at SirsiDynix Institute’s Web Archive which covers many Web 2ey things at http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php esp the excellent ideas loaded summary session by Meredith Farkas, titled Wiki: The Ultimate Tool For Online Collaboration .  In this one she makes reference to a wiki for subject resources created by Chad Boeninger of Ohio Uni Library at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/index.php/Main_Page . 

I’ve also seen this one referred to by others, so I’m not sure how many good examples are actually out there, or how many academics (with the publishing pressures & the need to appear innovative etc) are writing about a limited number of viable models.

Theoretically the formal part of the project comes to an end, though I am sure it will continue for a while yet.

A few thoughts…

Have had a better look at Wordpress blog functionality & customisability.  It looks very impressive, had I more time to spare for playing.  Have installed the plugin for Flickr, which enabled the drag /drop exercise in an earlier post.  Also made use of the Blogroll feature to add some of the blogsreferred to herein.

Would also be interested in looking at VOX in more detail.  The more you learn, the more something else interesting comes along…

The Wikispaces wiki seems to work pretty well, but is inadequate for our needs.  The formatting quirks will make it easier for someone to cause problems in there, or leave frustrated.  At present the advertising would also not be acceptable.

As suggested earlier, our own hosted wiki with our badging & increased functionality would be the go.  Anne Bartlett-Braggs suggested that Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ was a wiki “to die for”, & while I’ve never felt quite that enthusiastic (& a lot of people seem to die for a lot less), I would certainly like to give it a try.  Apparently, make the most of the plug-ins.

Thought Google Docs or Zoho Writer with multiple user access & ‘publish’ option might be another alternative for the links, but am not happy about a URL that crosses half the country.

The other day I filled in a survey – I think the link came via email, & it looked interesting & relevant, being a Flexiblelearning.net project on Social Software for Learning -

“The purpose of this survey is to identify how ‘social software’ or ‘Web 2.0’ technologies are currently being used in teaching and learning today and to gauge how social software can significantly contribute to certain forms of learning”

As usual I can’t help myself with forced choice survey questions & make a welter of the open ended questions.  Soon after I received an email from Val Evans, one of the research team, in response to some of my comments.  A few email exchanges later & the project includes one of my referred readings as a discussion starter, & the following

“your delicious tagging is brilliant! … I would love to include these links in our research wiki as an example of social bookmarking – nobody has offered such well-organised links to-date. Would that be okay? 

Also your horticulture wiki is a great example how a statewide system can collaborate. In fact, you could spread it even wider and make it national. Again, with permission, can I include it as an example on our wiki under Teaching and Learning sites?”

With all due humility (the tagging is a very basic first effort), who am I to refuse?  So this project is now recorded on her Project wiki at http://socialsoftware-research.wikispaces.com/TandLSites  and lo and behold I also have a comment on the post beneath.  Good grief – from initial spam to the CEO of pbWIKI one day, and Val the next – I have a readership !

Goodness.  I try to be careful with my comments & the next time I log on I have a comment & email notification from the CEO of pbWiki asking about the issues I noted, the content of which suggests that a real person read my comment & made the enquiry.  I am impressed!  At this stage I would note simply that pbWiki was impressive but in my time-limited run through the alternative had the edge.  Will look in more detail & get back when have a chance… in virtual space almost anyone can hear you whisper…

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/

OK, so Delicious has been a pretty useful tool.  However, it needs some experience to work it.  What we need for this exercise is a manageable, potentially social, resource that sits outside the formal website realms of the bureaucracy’s IT police (it needs to be able to be changed quickly, not in a year’s time after a million forms), & it also needs capability for adding more information than Delicious can handle – some intro, background, explanatory notes, etc.  It would also be useful to be able to lock some pages from public access but also open other pages which might be used as student / staff work spaces.  For example, if the students had a particular project they could use the provided links here, then add a few they discover along the way that might be useful for others.  Once vetted, they could then be added to the secure area.  But this raises problems depending on the WIKI we choose – the freebies – our current restriction – all have different functionality, with numerous roundabouts & swings.