Crucial Thought

So I’ve had a few days to work with my kids on the idea of a wiki. First, let me say that that are absolutely thrilled with the possibility of connecting with students from other parts of the world and hearing what they think on the subject of immigration. So after all the wonderful comments on my last Wiki post I spent some more time tweaking my ideas and then decided to carefully implement. First, some background.

I have two students that are with me during two separate class periods but do not receive a grade. They are both honors students but otherwise a typical microcosm of the student body, writ large. So before I rolled this out to the entire class I had my two students spend some time using the four hosted options explored in the last post, namely Wetpaint, Wikispaces, Jotspot, and PbWiki. The results surprised me. But before I tell you which they chose, some more to the story.

The first comment on my last post came from Miguel Guhlin, whose insight always proves, well, insightful. He corrected an error in my last post, where I erroneously stated that Jotspot did not have a WYSIWYG editor. In fact it does, and it rivals word processing software in its ease of use. So for that, I owe you an apology. I misspoke.

So thanks to Miguel and a few email conversations, I gave Jotspot a revisit. Personally, I liked it a bunch, but I was not sure if it would stand the test of kids. Only our trial would tell.

So my two students sat down and tried the wikis out. All four of them. Believe it or not, they all preferred Jotspot. I have to admit I was a bit surprised, especially since the way I asked them to test it was to sit and play with it. I gave them no formal instruction whatsoever, and they took to it swimmingly. Yay, Jotspot!

Their comments in regards to Wikispaces were that it was a little confusing, and they wanted to be able to comment without having to register. That is a big deal for the eleven year-old mind since they are still so worried about what their parents think. I think that’s a good thing. It may be possible to turn on anonymous comments in Wikispaces, but even that would not have swayed my kids’ opinion. They were hooked on Jotspot. Wetpaint confused them, and PBWiki didn’t interest them in comparison. Now I should add a side note that PbWiki has a special place in my heart and will serve nicely for some teacher projcets I am working on. Just not for my kids, yet. It desparately needs WYSIWYG, which I think they are working on. For more on that topic, see the comments to the wiki post, Ramit himself sounds off. No worries, Ramit, PbWiki is close to my heart.

So back to Jotspot. I like the clean interface and WYSIWYG editor. I don’t really need Spreadsheets or some of the other applications that are available but it’s nice to have them, though. So as I was playing around with Jotspot, I ran into a major snag. By default, free accounts are not publically accessible. Quoting their knowledgebase…

Beginning with version 2.7, we made a change with our default account permissions. For Personal (free) accounts, Guest Access needs to be enabled by JotSpot. We made this change as a means to fight spammers who were using Jot accounts as spam farms.

So now I’m in a jam. I need my wiki to be pubically accessible for my kids to be able to read it and other folks to come and comment on it. I noticed the upgraded account allows you to make the wiki guest accessible easily. I wasn’t sure how to feel, so I shot an email to support at jot dot com as per their request. I didn’t hear anything back all day so I began to get a little downtrodden thinking my experiment was on the verge of falling apart. Ultimately, I figured it was worth a phone call to Jotspot, so I called! A wonderful gentleman answered the phone and took care of my request within minutes! Yay, Jotspot! (again!)

So this morning I showed my kids the front page of the Jotspot wiki for our immigration debate. I was able to make it where only I can edit the home page but they can edit any other page as well as add comments anonymously. That might be risky, but I will be watching this wiki like a hawk. Truth be told, I anticipate that if there is any trouble, someone else might take care of it before I see it anyway.

On another note, I spoke with Jeff Utecht and he is ready and willing to collaborate. I can’t tell you how excited my kids are! So go check the wiki out, there’s not much there, but as of next week or so, there will be! We would love to hear your thoughts on our project! Is the project a good idea? Are their ideas well formed considering the young age? Now it’s your turn!!