Round up yer wiki-ing, pardner!

I just got early word that wikispaces is expanding their program of ad-free fully featured wikis that was up to now offered only for K-12, and making it available for higher education too.

We’re taking it to the next level. Our great ad-free, private, Plus-featured wikis are now free to higher education, as well.

With this whole new audience for our wikis, we’re extending our commitment to give away 2 million total free wikis for education. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education. That means wikis for teachers, students, professors, researchers, librarians — anyone and everyone using their wikis in K-12 or higher education. So spread the word and let’s achieve something great together.

If you’re using your wiki exclusively for K-12 education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information at http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/teachers.

If you’re using your wiki exclusively for Higher Education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information at http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/highered.

I have used Wikispaces a lot over the last 4+ years, the home for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (and its first version at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+ways), the Web 2.0 Storytelling wiki that goes with an article I co-wrote with Bryan Alexander.

These are all on the basic free service that works well, even with the ads. But the version wikispaces offers not only takes away the ads, but gets you the full features (page level permission control for one) that I use extensively on our paid hosted versions at NMC for the Horizon Reports and more.

Round ‘em up, cowboys and cowgirls! It’s time to wiki it up

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by alandberning

Might be time to take a road trip to Wikieup, AZ, and see what the desert wikis are up to.

I want a law named after me ;-) Call this CogDog’s Law of Web Tools:

The “best” tool is the one I am currently using the most.

This played out earlier this week during Howard Rheingold’s session for the CCK08 session. While he was talking about his new social media tool, in a back channel, people were talking about wikis.

“Question- what is the best free wiki site?”

“I like wikispaces- it has great tools for embedding media.”

“PBWiki has the best editing features.”

“WetPaint is very cool.”

It is a bit of a silly pursuit that there is an absolute “best” internet tool– ou might as well go to Home Depot and hear the same conversations in the power tool aisle:

“I only by Dewault- they have the best power supplies and have been most durable on my drilling sites. Besides, it was all my Dad ever had in his shop.”

“No way, Makita is known industry-wide in home construction for the strongest motors and horsepower- I have never had one let me down.”

It happens with wikis, blogging platforms, web programming languages, mobile phones, beer, operating systems… it just seems human nature.

I get the question all the time when I do my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story workshops — they want to know which of the 50+ is the “best”.

And I never provide an answer. Such a blanket opinion is meaningless, and depends on so many factors of specific use. And there never will be a “best”. I can share ones I like or ones that have some unique features, but it is not like a quantitative measure of “best-ness”.

So back to wikis, I have observed (and I engage in this myself I admit), then when the question comes up, I am highly favoring of the one I use the most. It makes obvious sense, since I would not use one I did not think was best. And I know all about the one I use the most because I have likely explored many of its features, and can use them almost without thinking about them, like a reflex. The “other” tool, that I don’t use or not very much, is more unfamiliar, and I may not even know all it can do.

So I submit it is a pointless exercise to say whether my Wikispace can “beat up” your PBWiki — if I am savvy, I am going to listen to the ways you use your wiki, and what it can do, and file that information away, because some day I am going to find that “my” wiki does not do something I think it should.

And in the higher altitude view– they both accomplish the same thing; providing a free platform for people to openly collaborate on content creation via a wiki constructor set.

But again (!) this was not exactly what I wanted to focus on… I have been using Wikispaces a lot the last few years, and it was really good for my 50 Ways site for demonstrating how embedded media content works, since the widget tool in Wikispaces allows you to insert almost any cut and paste embed code (FWIW in PBWiki you can insert the same directly into the HTML source when you are editing).

The thing I did want to share is I was recently looking at the help docs in Wikispaces and found a whole raft of cool codes you can use that I did not know about (as one who usually plunges in without looking, I content it sometimes it pays to read the help docs).

There are all kinds of codes you can toss in that dynamically insert information – see the Wikitext Variables section

• {$page} inserts the name of a page
• {$revisiondate} inserts the date of the last change to the page
• {$creator} inserts the name of the person that created the page

Another one I forget helps when you have a brainstorming page where you ask people to annotate their changes with their name, so you can tell you write what– if you insert 4 squiggles: “~~~~” Wikispaces automatically inserts your user name.

There is a long list of more of these. But the thing I got excited about was it has includes- or what I use in MediaWiki as Templates. These are separate pieces of content you can set up, and then have inserted to any page you add an include code.

Tghese are most useful for creating page footers, or navigation links, or just any repeated content that you want on multiple pages. The benefit of this is when you change the originating source content; all the pages that include that chunk are automatically updated. This saves huge amounts of editing time.

From the Help section on Includes what I just described is a simple page include, but you can also insert code that inserts a list of all pages on your wiki, or just ones with a give tag or a tag cloud for your site…

So before finding this, I had cut and paste footers on the bottom of every page of our Web 2.0 Storytelling site – if I needed to change them, I’d have to manually update every page on the site.

But armed with this new knowledge of variables and includes, I have a much better method. I created a page called Footer that has this code:

This wiki is and open space for discussion of the 
EDUCAUSE Review article Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a 
New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine. This page was 
created on {$creationdate} by {$creator} and has been edited 
{$pagerevisions} times. The last change was made by 
[[user:{$revisioneditor}]] on {$revisiondate}

All of the items in {xxx} are dynamic and will be replaced by relevant information on the pages they appear on. All I need to do to have this inserted into may pages, is to put (where I want it to appear):

[[include page="Footer"]]

(You can also use the Widget tool to insert a Wikipage). Which means, now I get a dynamic footer on all pages that use this, e.g. here are two different ones:

Now footers are pretty pedestrian– and you can also think about perhaps headers you might want on all your pages, or perhaps a logo you want on different pages– if there is any content you find yourself repeatedly copy/pasting to wikipages, templates/includes are invaluable, especially to update quickly.

And it gets really interesting when you have includes which include includes!

So I am looking at the PBWiki manual, and not yet finding all of these features, but seeing other things I like- some of the different widgets available (any Google Gadget can be embedded); the new PBWiki 2.0 feature to toggle from edit to view is great, and for some, a more featured WYSIWYG editor.

For me, one is not “better” than another, and there are compelling features of either.

Of course, I do recognize that it does come down for people new to the scene to ask, “which one should I use?”, and just be prepared that the answer depends…. on who you ask.

And lastly– none of this matters int terms of building a “good” wiki site; the buttons, widgets, magic code are just the framework for what really counts– your idea and strategy for using the wiki. The “best” wikis are ones that come from good ideas, great execution, and lots of TLC and wiki gardening.

Coming never– announcing the “best” beer….

Over the summer, I was honored to collaborate with Bryan Alexander (that guy can write! We wrote the draft on Google docs and tagged madly our resources) on the article just hitting print/PDF/web in the November/December 2008 issue – Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre:

We are hoping to stir up some conversation about this, and are eager to have some push-back on our assertion. Our research googling on the topic mainly brought up… us! But as we’ve talked about it in our presentations and workshops, we get lots of nods of agreement.

Our article describes Web 2.0 Storytelling as “telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies.” emphasizing two components- microcontent and social media. We feel the rich media, non-linear capabilities, jumping of media platforms (or even ARG-like going out into the real world) make for a much different kind of expression than producing a personal video of some dog story.

So we want to generate some conversation, resource sharing, responses in story form. Our plan is then to have an open wiki-based discussion space for the month of November, after which we will archive the site as a resource for EDUCAUSE. The wiki address was provided in the print and web versions, which went live Friday (I thought we’d have til today), so here is our Web2Storyteling wiki:

Please help us out by getting some things into the four main response sections of the wiki (it is open to editing, no log in required). There is nothing more self-reinforced as lonely as an empty/sparse wiki. When people see a blank space, it seems they hesitate to be the first to write.

Please please pretty please toss something into http://web2storytelling.wikispaces.com/– I am hopeful with the light inbox and RSS readers that not all edtech heads are at EDUCAUSE conference in (lovely) Orlando.

How about a wiki inside an ePort?

Audree has rolled into the eport system a version of UseMod wiki.

She just gave me access to the test server, and the most interesting aspect is the inclusion of a Wiki creation tool. Just like the other “pages” in the MyePort software, the owner can create as many wikis as they decide. What is slixk ia that for each Wiki set up, the eportfolio author can elect from different wiki permissions:

1. Only the eportfolio owner can edit- perhaps use for simple page construction, or maybe brainstorming a list of goals, or…
2. The eportfolio owner can elect to give editing access to only users on the eportfolio system Maybe this could be a series of experience reflections or a draft of a project outline and the owner or project collaborators can add responses or suggestions.
3. A wide open wiki- not sure at all how this might be used, but it is there.

And then the eportfolio owner can also apply the over arching privacy settings to create passwords to limit access to any of the wiki pages.

So in addition to a good set of page types (documents, collections, slide shows, polls/surveys, blogs, and a calender, now this tool has an ePort wiki. And there is automatic streaming of Quicktime video and upload mp3s, RSS syndication (including podcasting for included media files).

we are now seeing a growing amount of uptake of eport usage as there are now almost 120 published ones on our server– including an interesting batch of ones from Art students, education students, some library technology students, faculty creating teaching portfolios… I am hoping over the summer some of our eportfolio leaders will look at doing some meta analysis of the eportfolio activity, as just in some simple browsing there is a wide array of good artifact posting and reflection here.

Our eports are going to be really cooking this year!