EdTechPost brought me a post NoteMesh - another student-centric note taking service. Upon first read, I thought this sort of collaborative approach to note-taking — an essential skill in my estimation — to be detrimental to learning. Maybe not. Maybe collaboration between the stronger and weaker students could result in “the rising tide lifting all boats.”
After all, an essential element of education is, in my view, the development of knowledge, skill, and experience in working on teams.
Wired online has a nice article today talking about Wikis beyond WikiPedia. In particular, it explores some of the other programs that are useful for groups creating a WiKi:
Several companies are trying to cash in on wikis by making it easy for non-techies to start sites allowing quick and easy collaboration. Among them are Jot, Wetpaint, PBwiki, Wikispaces, Wiki.com and Wikia, started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Some of these wikis already allow WYSIWYG editing. “I’d like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the Parent Teacher Association,” said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. Socialtext is attempting to make its WYSIWYG click-and-type editor more widespread; at this year’s Wikimania conference, Socialtext announced it was working with Wikia and Wikimedia to integrate Wikiwyg into Wikipedia’s software.
I am wondering if any of our readers (or bloggers) have used any of the above Wiki sites for course-related wikis.
Check out the article!
Also: file under meta-blogging, I guess, but I just copied and pasted from Wired’s website and noticed that all the hotlinks carried over. I never noticed that before. WordPress (the blogging medium we are using here at http://cac.ophony.org) is good.
Have any of you tried using Writely? It’s a site where you can share the writing and editing of documents, collaboratively. Teachers are beginning to use it as a space where students can write a document together, or do peer review. It would be useful for faculty who are co-authoring, too. Registration is free and takes two minutes. You can create documents there, or upload and download them in various formats (Word and others).
Recent Comments