this is nice

I’ve used a few wiki systems over the years, and for a technology so simple I’ve at times found it surprisingly difficult to create the kind of pages I wanted and needed. The arrival of wiki editors facilitated things somewhat, making formatting a lot easier, but my other main challenges with wikis were:

1. uploading/linking to images

2. keeping my pages organized in some sort of navigation structure

A couple of years ago I blogged about PB wiki (peanut butter wiki), a free wiki that had some features I really liked which seemed novel at the time: public or private settings, a nice interface, and decent navigation. A recent visit reacquainted me with this tool, but setting up an account and getting to my new wiki space ( I couldn’t remember my old login) proved to be a bit laborious and a few more steps than I would have liked. I recall that PB wiki was quite active in continually improving their product ( I recall liking the education-oriented templates they offered), and the homepage boasts that it has more pages than wikipedia–which, let’s face it, is a considerable accomplishment. But like some other tools I’ve used (WebCT comes to mind) improvements sometimes get in the way of useability, and at some point *less* truely is *more*. I still think PB wiki is a great tool to suggest to students and instructors, but for the new-to-wiki set I would probably recommend Zohowiki.  I’ve been a fan of other products in the Zoho suite, but the Zoho wiki really does everything I would have liked a wiki to do.  Here’s a checklist.

1.  quick and easy to get started

2.  an extensive editor so I don’t need to know any wiki code to format

3. really simple image uploading

4. a comments feature at the bottom of the page (which I prefer over a tabbed discussion page)

5. public/private wiki option

The bonus *I love* features that make this my number one choice for teaching are:

1.  simple, clean navigation.  I didn’t get lost in my collection of wiki pages and could find them quickly and easily.

2. the ability to add pages and subpages to form a collection of pages hierarchically connected to a homepage (think about the educational possibilities! The homepage could be Course A, the subpages could be the weekly topics, the sub sub pages could be activities related to each week ).  Importantly, these are conveniently displayed in a navigation column on the right, as well as with breadcrumbs at the top.

3. RSS everywhere! On all the pages!  This includes a ‘recently changed’ section that appears at login. This means that if you are teaching with the wiki, and have asked students to have their own wiki spaces for project work or whatever, you can stay on top of their activity and know if they have made changes.

4. A ‘global links’ box that can be edited to include links to other wiki pages (think course topics, or student projects) , or  external URLS (eg. student blogs, or other reference material)

The limitations of wikis have caused me to use them in conjunction with other tools–a CMS or a weblog, for example.  I’m pretty sure I could teach an entire online course using Zoho wiki, and it certainly could be a great ‘just in time’ teaching tool option.

catching up

During my blogging hiatus, which corresponded with my move to the Canadian Polytechnic where I now am employed and a subsequent maternity leave (identical twins!!), I was jotting down on a post-it note new tools that I thought would be useful for instructors and students, but needed more time to explore.  I came back to a very tidy cubicle (thank you tidyers) but no post-it.  I’m trying to recall some of those tools, and bubbl.us came to mind.  I remember liking bubbl.us because like my old standby, Gliffy, it passed the 2 minute test and the drag, drop, click interface works nicely.  But bubbl.us is definitely more suited to concept mapping, since connections between ideas are automatically drawn .  In the past I’ve taught an online distance course where a student assignment was to submit and share a concept map–we used CMap for this purpose, but it wasn’t as seamless as we had hoped.  Bubbl.us would be a good replacement–a quick visit shows that the interface is even more intuitive than before, and the ability to collaborate with others (something we love to do in our constructivist-designed online courses) is a huge plus.  The usual import and export features are there, and although I haven’t tested those recently, I’m pretty confident they work quite nicely–at the very least, it’s easy to find.

more visualisation tools

About 5 years ago I started a mental “wouldn’t it be nice if…” list of technologies/software that I wish existed. I’m still reeling from excitement at a tool that my colleague Paul here at Canadian Polytechnic just pointed me to–Manyeyes, since it’s one of those *better than I hoped* tools that I can scratch off my list. Manyeyes lets you simply convert data sets to visualisation tools, and in 2.0 spirit allows comments and discussion about the data. I’m still exploring, but just a quick look at the visualisation possibilities is educational in itself–clicking on the Learn More link leads to informative descriptions of when and how the corresponding visualisation is appropriate. This alone is well worth a visit from grad students trying to get a grip on qualitative and/or quantitative research methods and data presentation. However, ethics committees will probably want you to take a look at the Terms of Service, since it’s not really suited to data that is confidential.

the not quite new year

After a 1 year hiatus from blogging (I left my UBC job last February, and with it left Connections and E-learning in the Faculty of Dentistry) it’s time to resume. I imagine it will be more of the same–finding and testing (web 2.0) tools that could be useful for busy instructors and students. This is the fourth higher ed institution that been employed by, and the one thing that never changes is that instructors need educational technologies that:

1. take less than 2 minutes to set up an account and learn

2. require minimal to no support from IT staff

3. are free

4. don’t require a lot of orientation for students to get up and running

I’ve wrapped these principles in a workshop introducing instructors to the wonders of Google docs and Gliffy which I’ll capture and post the next time it’s delivered.

Previous posts have been imported

…from the moveable type blog I maintained at my former institution (UBC).  Since I worked part of the time with the Faculty of Dentistry, many of those posts contain dentistry specific examples and references.

The import process was easy shmeezy… who knew it could be so simple!