On the official Get Satisfaction page, the founder and CEO of PbWiki responded to my inquiry.
Hi! This is a tough issue. We’ve had a lot of teachers emailing us asking for us to make sure an address gets entered before proceeding so they know which students are making which changes, so several months ago we started asking that *some* address be provided. It sounds like you’ve just discovered that that solution doesn’t work well for you. Can you help us think of a setup that would work better?
What do you think? I can understand the need for some teachers to record at least a name, but I think requiring an email address is too much.
My suggestion to him will be, require a first name (and I think it’s important to note first name only needed) and make the email address not required. I think if kids are not doing this appropriately then it’s more of a classroom management issue and one not necessarily designed to be handled by software.
Or, make it where the user can decide? In some setting somewhere, make it where I can say, “I do not want my contributors to have to share their email address”, etc.
My thoughts, what are yours?
Chris
Ann Oro says:
A setting would be the optimal solution, but might take some extra programming on their end. I think a generic name should be sufficient. The teacher could then tell the class what should go in there – first name, class userid, whatever – just a generic field.
I agree that email ids make it very difficult depending on the age group.
Ann
19th February 2008 at 5:56 pm
Pat says:
I think a first name with last initial so you can identify who is making the changes. I agree that this is an internal issue and not a software one. Of course, I liked the option of letting teachers make the choice after they set up the main page.
19th February 2008 at 7:30 pm
tchalvak says:
You could also simply create a single guest account using a single guest email, and then let them all use that, if that was simple enough.
19th February 2008 at 9:41 pm