I try out some Wikis

I have looked over the free Wikis out there and have come to the conclusion that there are two reasonable candidates for review. The first site I found (wikispaces.com) is one of the larger Wiki hosting sites. The other is Google Sites, and is a great place to create a Wiki…if you have some sort of a Google identity (i.e. a Google email address…). I also looked at a number of other Wiki hosting sites, as well as some other places (Zoho, and others). The fact of the matter is that these two sites (Wiki Spaces, and Google Sites) seem to provide the best (and most) services for free. The other Wiki sites are all fine sites, but I decided that since they are all so similar, I would go with one of the larger providers.

Last month I did a similar review of some of the most common free blogging sites, and the most important question (if only after the fact) was about what you ‘would’ do with a blog, versus ‘could’. So, with these two wiki services, the same question starts to loom into view. I am interested (primarily) in wikis from the stand point of being a teacher. With this premise there are two basic things you can do with a Wiki. (1) You can use a wiki for a specific class project, or (2) you could create a sort of classroom portal for students and their parent. The fact that a Wiki is not necessarily based upon a chronological listing of entries (as a blog is) serves this idea well.

To get started with the Wikispaces site, all that you need would be an email address and a password. Once you have certified that it is your email address (they sent you a message with a clickable link back to the Wikispaces site) you are set up! At this point I would suggest looking over the many informative videos that they host on their site to help in getting you started with your new wiki (http://www.wikispaces.com/site/tour). They provide (on an ala cart basis) a number of paid additions to your new site such as domain names, professionally designed themes, custom colors etc. but for the needs of this review I decided to go with vanilla.

To get started with the Google site, merely go to http://sites.google.com/ . If you have a valid Google email address (Gmail) you just click on the create site button. At this point you will be presented with a number of theme options, colors, and names for your Wiki. Since I decided to use this Wiki as if it were for a classroom, I clicked on the education wiki theme. Unlike the Wikispaces wiki, this creation comes with an almost complete classroom portal installation. You need to merely add your picture, and cut and paste whatever information you want into the site. You have control over presenting such things as:

· School announcements

· Classroom rules

· Reading lists

· A class calendar

· A chronological list of class assignments (much like a blog listing)

· A personal bio

· And quite a few more additions

To give you a sense of what this looks like at first blush I have a couple links to show you what I could create in the first two or three minutes with these two sites.

The Wikispaces site: http://riehlerwiki.wikispaces.com/

And the Google Sites Wiki: http://sites.google.com/site/riehlerwiki/

As you can see, it looks like the Google Site is already a custom classroom portal, and with an afternoon’s customization, this could be a very impressive way to interact with Parents, as well as to provide a backstop for students who might be out of class for a period of time. There are other themes which would allow another Google Sites wiki to perform as a project specific wiki, as well as almost any number of things.

The Wikispaces Wiki I created is quite a bit more Spartan in looks, but for a classroom project (one with a lot of student content creation) this site would be a fine tool. I should mention that both of these sites allow for embedding photos, links, videos (they present linked videos, but don’t host them…), and even downloadable files. As one of many examples, you could have a class project based upon student research into almost anything. With this Wikispaces wiki, you could have students (working alone, or in groups) upload their content to the wiki. The real value in this sort of site is that all of the students who have access to the Wiki also have access to add or edit other students work. In essence this creates a situation where the whole Wiki is an interactive collaboration between all of the students. With the present day focus upon such things as portfolios, an online collaborative presentation of a large and complex topic would be a valid authentic product of scholastic work.

Obviously there are plenty of other uses for Wikis than merely for school environments. Since Wikis can have multiple authors (almost as a default, unlike blogs), almost any group of people involved in almost any kind of endeavor might have a use for something like this…especially when you look over some of the themes which Google Sites provides. There are some obvious cases (clubs, and other groups which might have a need for online ‘newsletter’ like presentations of information. Small groups in large companies could use this as a means to keep everyone ‘up to speed’ on a variety of ongoing projects (mitigating the need for a lot of time wasting meetings). I have seen this sort of web site used to present information about school reunions, fishing contests, food coops, groups of amateur photographers, amateur astronomers, gardeners, cooks… Obviously this sort of a list could go on and on.

I have looked over Wiki hosting sites on and off, over the last several years, but I must say that the new additions to Google Sites (all free!) seem to overpower everything else I could find. There is Wiki hosting on Zoho (to accomplish anything of real value would take some $), and the vast majority of Wiki only hosting sites only have would could only be called bare bones installations in comparison. Even the Wikispaces site I started is in the shadows of this new Google initiative with Wikis. It’s too bad, since the Wikispaces Wiki is quite a god deal (it’s free!), and if you don’t need flashy graphics it serves its purpose quite well.

I suppose I should mention that almost all of the offerings you can find online for free wikis have WYSIWYG editors. The two wikis I have set up are incredibly easy to edit and change, by and large, you merely have to click on an edit button and then cut, copy, and paste to your heart’s desire. Only a couple years ago, when I first started looking into Wikis (three years ago!), there were a lot of Wikis which could only be modified though some use of a meat-language (usually HTML) which created a situation where you were a reader or an editor…but it took time to go back and forth between the two. To those HTML coders out there, you can still find Wikis which take coding, and to the other 95% of potential Wiki users out there…life got quite a bit easier.

There are a lot of meta-political identifications people take upon themselves with regard to how they conduct themselves online. I know some who hate Microsoft, others hate Apple fanboi’s, there are some who hate particular browsers, products, or even specific IM applications. If you are one who sees the need to hate using Google products (too bad…) there is always a site like Wikispaces.com to check out. This might be the start toward developing some real skills with websites. On the other hand if you a relatively agnostic about some of these personal identifications, Google Sites seems to have an incredible product out there (for free!).

If you are still interested in Wikis, but aren’t persuaded by my review, I have a number of links with which you can use to start into your own research:

Wiki Creation – Create A Wiki For Free! – Wiki-site

http://www.wiki-site.com/index.php/Wiki_Creation_-_Create_A_Wiki_For_Free%21

Free Website – Wetpaint

http://www.wetpaint.com

Wiki.com

http://www.wiki.com

Get started with Google Sites templates – Official Google Docs Blog

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/11/get-started-with-google-sites-templates.html

Google Sites rolls out template gallery for web pages, wikis

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/17/google-sites-rolls-out-template-gallery-for-web-pages-wikis

Templates – How does a project wiki site differ from the Project Worksite – Google Sites Help

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sites/thread?tid=5d55c6677e4efbfb&hl=en