Create content collaboratively?!

There are often occasions where a group of people will have the need to create a single document or piece of content. There are many ways this can be approached, and quite often sending a word document around by e-mail is the process used.

We have often mentioned here about how Wikis can be used effectively for this collaborative content creation process.

I've come across a blog post about someones experiences with collaborative document creation, and how using Google Documents (which is a service that operates similiarly to a Wiki) and a virtual classroom tool Elluminate enabled this process to be completed rather easily.

http://emerge.elgg.org/awesome/weblog/628.html

Wikis in plain English

Over the last few days i've come across links in several places, to an instructional video called Wikis in plain English. Created by Lee Lefever of CommonCraft, the first heads up came to a couple of us through Chris Joblings, blog Fresh and Crispy.

This is a brilliant video clip, it is the best explanation of how a Wiki works that i've ever seen, and i've seen a few. Its simple, its in non-technical language, and already i can imagine many situations where this could be a useful tool.

It can be found on YouTube here.

But more interestingly it can be found on dotSUB here, where it comes with subtitles in many different languages, and you can also add subtitles in a language if you can translate.

Ad-Free web-based Wikis for Education

pbwiki have announced that they are offering Wikis designated as Educational Wikis (which provides access to specific Educational templates) as Add Free.

Take a look at some of the features they offer.

To find out more, or to sign up go to: http://pbwiki.com/edu.html

Wikis as a collaborative Tool

Using Wikis to quickly and simply create shared websites

Friday's Lunch and Learn session in SDU (a 1 hour session where lunch was served, information provided, and questions answered), was all about Wikis!

What are Wikis? Essentially they are a set of web pages which can be quickly and easily edited through a web-browser. A Wiki is a piece of software, where the main feature of is an "edit" link or button on the web pages, which gives you a simple editing panel enabling you to add content without needing to know any web languages. More

Wiki is a bit of an odd looking term, but in fact it is the Hawaiian word for "Quick"! The creator of Wikis Ward Cunningham, was inspired by the Wiki Wiki (Quick Quick) busses at the airport in Hawaii. And what better term for software that allows you to quickly edit web pages, than Wiki!

Most of us are familiar with Wiki's because of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedic website that is as commonly used as Google.


Wikis enable more than one person to edit the content on a page, quickly and easily. This enables the content to have been placed by many different authors, of varying expertise, where information that one person doesn't know is added by someone else, so that the document is cohesive, and as extensive as possible.

Wikis are really useful for collaborative activities, which fits well in the educational environment. Some activities that a Wiki could be used for are:
Brainstorming/Mind Mapping; for Collaborative Document Creation; Group Projects; Event Planning; Meeting management; Lists; Simple Websites; Shared Web resources…… there are many possibilities.

Within the session we looked at many examples of Wikis, and at exactly how easy it is to edit a Wiki page. A handout was given at the end of the session and can be found here: http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=wikis