edna.edu.au

Just curious if anyone has experience of using wikis with students within NSW DET portal. Current filters seem to block them all and requests to unblock so far have met with lengthy delays and frustrations at school. Students are using them at home with no problems, but a bit self defeating.

WetPaint [see link] is a very good classroom wiki service. It seems to be set up for education, and if used in a school or other education facility, you can request that the ads be turned off. Just as editme's forte is web publishing, and media wiki's is very powerful text-focused collaboration, WetPaint's feature is collaboration. The display looks a bit crowded, but is very cool when a bunch of people are contributing to a page and their images appear on the left. It has good security and privacy controls.

Yes, Tom you have a good point, that wikis and other tools are evolving in diverging and overlapping ways. The term wiki (quick in Hawaiian) is holding up well as a good choice.

Wikis are getting beyond their original vision of creating content quickly with lighweight formatting. Group based Access Control is an unusual feature and might [helpfully] restrict the number of choices. Also - could you identify separate out the need for web hosting vs the need of a hosted wiki service. Consider Google docs as a non-wiki option here...

Have a look at the way wikis and files are used in the Books and REading edna group which uses the moodle wiki. http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=616

mediawiki is the one which is used by wikipedia and wikia. The wikimedia commons has CC or free images and files which can be reused. The communities using these wikis have a lot of experience in online collaboration if youre looking to integrate the tool choice with good support for communities of practice.

I agree that no-one can possibly know all the wikis available out there. Using WikiMatrix.org's choice wizard for what I thought schools, professional associations would find most useful I got the fully response: "You want a hosted offer with WYSIWYG editing and a page history using your own domain and which allows your own corporate branding. The following 13 Wikis match your criteria: BrainKeeper, CentralDesktop, ClearWiki, Metadot Wiki, Netcipia, PBwiki, SamePage, ScribbleWiki, SeedWiki, Socialtext, StikiPad, Wetpaint and Wikispaces

some wiki tools are just wikis. For example, the Moodle wiki is still a very "bare" wiki. However other wikis like editme.com are really a wiki/blog combination, almost providing the same features as a full blown website. Many teachers use Wiki Spaces for its ease of use, and in Higher ed lots of people use PBWiki

Which wiki? I hear you ask. Well, I have an answer for you. I am a happy user of several editme.com wikis. Here are some of their features. Low cost, $US4.95 a month for a small one, $29 for 'professional' with 500Mb storage and so on. Looks good, with choice of 'skins', and a full set of wiki functions like Change listings, Versions of any page, Index of all pages, etc etc. A powerful feature of editme is very fine security and access controls. In a school, for example, Groups and Policies can be set up so that Class 8 can view and edit class pages, only Bill Brown can edit his page, all students can view but not edit other class pages, teachers can edit and manage everything and so on. I have used it in a university setting for several years and students with low skills can create and manage their pages and view others. More later!