Nightmare of a day (an open letter to Pbwiki and Wikispaces)
February 19, 2008
Oh boy has this been a heck of a day.
I had an amazing day planned for my kids, with two days of the computer lab blocked off for our use. I was planning for us to spend our time exploring Ancient Rome in Google Earth and making placemarks, adding descriptions, reading the included Wikipedia articles. Notice I said I was planning…
I got to the computer lab to find out that Google Earth was not available to students. My workaround to that had been “fixed” so now I had no workaround.
And 20 students with nothing to do.
I scrambled and put together a project where they research in Wikipedia (rebellious, eh?) and then put their information into a PowerPoint presentation.
Not much else they can access.
I made sure to talk about the basics of good PowerPoint design, I ruled out clip art use and cheesy backgrounds, and ended up teaching a good design lesson.
It’s still not Google Earth.
I then switched gears after lunch and decided to pilot a wiki-based research project and created a new pbwiki. It used to be that as long as I gave the kids the wiki password they could edit until their hearts were content.
No more.
The recent changes in PbWiki’s login procedures have made it where they have to have a wiki invite key and then enter a name and email address.
Sigh.
Even when I told them the wiki invite key and told them to make up a name and email address I was frought with problems with the software not allowing kids through. A lot of the kids simply didn’t know the basic syntax of an email address. Of course, you can’t not include a name and email address.
I asked for help in pbwiki’s Get Satisfaction page, but as of yet there’s been no answer.
So I switched to Wikispaces. I threw together a new wiki that didn’t have ads and had them go to work. I created new pages for each group and had them edit their own pages. Naturally, there’s a chance someone could edit someone else’s, but hey, it’s a reasonable risk.
Except that I wanted them to create a new page for each of the places I asked them to research.
They can’t create pages. Drat!
So back to the drawing board, they can’t create pages and I don’t have the brain power amidst answering a slew of questions to create five pages for each group (and there are roughly ten groups per block). That would be counterproductive.
They progressed nicely once we got up and running, although I had loads of trouble with them typing in the wiki address.
exploringancientrome.wikispaces.com
How hard is that? Most of them typed exploring ancient rome wiki spaces into the address bar.
This tells me more and more than they know how to play but basic operations are beyond them, at times.
So, I implore you, pbwiki, let my kids edit with only an invite key. Let that happen on the free version.
As for you, wikispaces, please let my kids create new pages. Or let that be something I decide in the manage space section.
And for goodness sake, Wikispaces, it’s time for a more robust WYSIWYG editor. One of the reasons I love pbwiki is due to their integration of FCKEditor. My kids prefer it, too, since it lets you control your text so much more nicely and more fine-grained.
Ok there’s my rant. Am I missing something here?
Chris
Posted in Software, Web Resources
content rss
February 19th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
You’re missing nothing but the inevitability of these problems.
February 19th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’ve used both wikispaces and pbwiki for various uses, but we’re currently making use of WetPaint wiki for use with some of our students (post-secondary technical college).
February 19th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Hey Chris,
I’m sorry you had such a pain with PBwiki logins. We heard from a lot of teachers that they wanted to know exactly who was on the wiki - and so we created a login process that necessitated entering in a name (be it real or fake).
Our work around for teachers who work with young students - or just want their students on the site asap - is to suggest using a fake email address. It sounds like this wasn’t the best solution for the youngest of students who aren’t sure even how to type in an email address.
Please email me at Kristine -at- pbwiki.com with your ideas on how to bridge the gap between allowing everyone on the wiki and making sure that teachers can account for who is on the wiki & when they were on the wiki. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Also - I thought the wikipedia article tactic was a great work-around. It does sound like you had a tough day.
Kristine
February 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Chris:
You must be exhausted from all the dancing you did today. It does explain what happened to me a few weeks ago. During training, I had a group of teachers access a public Wikispace. I had set up a link for each teacher and expected them to choose from a template to finish creating the page. They all had access issues. The following day I preset all the pages and they just edited and it was fine. I hadn’t taken time to explore it much further. This seems to bear out my suspicion that you had to be a member to add a page.
I do like the look and feel of Wikispaces better than PBwiki, but agree their WISIWYG editor is not as full featured. They’re developing all the time, so hopefully once the bleeding edge smooths out we’ll be in much better shape.
It’s stressful at best in these situations. I guess that’s why some teachers are so reluctant to touch technology unless necessary. Have a good evening!
Ann
February 19th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Hi Chris,
We’re sorry to hear we contributed to what sounds like a very rough day. Here are a few things we’ve got in store at Wikispaces we think will help a lot:
1. Allowing guest page creations. This makes good sense. We’ll add it as an option in the manage space section, defaulting to “off”. The reason we haven’t had this in the past is that it’s something spammers pounce on — but with active space organizers and our spam protection systems, we think it will be useful for many wikis.
2. Account creation for schools. Every week, we create thousands of accounts on behalf of teachers for students who don’t have email addresses. Right now, we do this based on requests sent to us, but we’ve got plans to streamline this process for organizers. We want you to be able to create 20 accounts for your wiki in a heartbeat — ideally, in the time it takes to go from Plan A to Plan B while your students are in the room.
3. Our editor. We’ve got some frequently-requested formatting features we’re testing right now. We think you’ll love them, and find they fill some gaps without making the editor overly complicated (or slow!).
As always, we’re here to help and listen to any suggestions you might have: help@wikispaces.com. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to thousands of passionate people like you — a huge percentage of them teachers — who tell us where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do better.
Best,
James
jbyers@wikispaces.com
February 20th, 2008 at 11:11 am
It sounds like you couldn’t work around the Google Earth issues, but with a little more planning you should have been fine with the wiki-issues. I’ve set up wikis with 5 or 6 student accounts, and then assign certain classes to those accounts, and then activate those accounts on the wiki. They could edit and create pages without a problem.
If you were justing allowing them to edit as guests, I can see the problem, but for the next go-around, try having them create their own accounts, or setup a class account for each section. That’s what I’ve done, and now I can use those same 12 accounts (one for each section of 4th grade) throughout the year if I want to make a new wiki for another project.