Online Resources | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Creating a Wiki?

Some advice that I would give to someone creating a wiki specifically for a class working synchronously:

Students must write their information in Word first – for better grammar, but especially for back-up.
Create separate designated pages for each student to work on – possibly name the pages with their name embedded to be changed out later – as the wiki creator, you may be the only one to have the page creation rights.
If you know multiple people will be working on the same pages at the same times, allocate time buffer zones that people may post – for example, if 4 people work on the same page, one may post between 4-6pm, another between 7-9pm, another between 10-12pm, and another between 6-8am.

There are always Revision histories, but having 15-30 students post on the same page at the same time DOES NOT WORK. Separate the tasks and times as best as you can.

I would actually recommend Google Docs or Microsoft One-note if you are networked and have that option. It depends on your final goal of the project.

Are you mobile?

23 Apr

When we ask this question the first thing that pops to my mind is: “Do I have a mobile device, like a cell phone, PDA, tablet or computer with wifi?”

This article is not about that.

This article is asking, “What would happen if all or any of those devices broke down on you?” A better question to ask would be:

Is your content mobile?

If your gadgets broke down right now, how much of the information would you consider irretrievable? How much of that information do you really need? I bet that some of you would say, “A Lot, if not most of it.” Starting right now, if you haven’t done so already, get yourself some online storage:

Box.net (5 Gigs of Free Storage – 25megs per file – Mobile Access)
Dropbox (2 Gigs of Free Storage – with a referral program up to 8 Gigs for Free – Mobile Access)

Next you need to think about your bookmarks. There are two ways about it:

Store them to access them online – Delicious
Sync them with every computer web-browser – XMarks

Certain documents can be saved, stored and shared online,. A great website for this:

Scribd (Upload Docs and even sell them to others – great for eBooks)

To create and save Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings and Forms:

Google Docs

All of these online areas, plus a whole lot more I didn’t mention, are called the “Cloud”, or “Cloud Computing”. It means that you have access with the idea that it is somewhere up in the sky. Ideally, we shouldn’t need to worry about it because it is being backed up all the time, plus we usually have access to revisions of the same document through these methods. Now, if you hear the question, “Are you mobile?” I hope you think of it through a new perspective. Not only that, I hope also you are making it so that your content actually is.

3 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on April 23, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Cloud Computing, Mobile, Online, Online Resources, Technology

Online collaboration tools

24 Mar

I am always looking for online collaboration tools. I found this excellent consolidation of sites out there. Check out this awesome post by Robin Goods:

www.mindmeister.com

Weebly vs Joomla vs WordPress

15 Feb

I have been working on a few different versions of the same sites and have been comparing my needs with what is offered with each of these site infrastructures.

I started using Weebly.com.

I enjoyed the back-end interface; a little clunky, but the built in blog was easy to add info to AND it had the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button built in automatically. The reason I moved away from Weebly was because there was no built in Search. I tried adding Google Search to the site, but to no avail. I am still not sure why. Plus, I didn’t like the idea of showing a “Google” search as advertising that I added this item in.

Next, I moved over to Orgfree.com. This hosting company allows free space and excellent integration of SQL databases to support for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, simple machines forum, Drupal, and Moodle. Talk about excellent…and EASY.¹

I started with a Joomla.org installation.

The intention was to strip out all the unnecessary pages, categories, menus, sections and then add a plug-in or module for blogging, as this was my primary concern. The easy blog plug-ins were not easy to install. The more simple sounding ones all seemed to cost money. I was not impressed. Joomla has offered an excellent infrastructure for so many other modules. I decided to try to WordPress.org.

WordPress was like an angel sent from heaven. For all my needs it was easy to install, very intuitive to use, had a great blog, minus the “like” and “tweet” buttons, which I will look for later. So far, I am enjoying the interface and may show my students how easy it is to create an online blog for themselves soon enough.

¹Sidenote: I have recently had access problems to the back-end of my WordPress installation with Orgfree. I have emailed them multiple times to try to gain access to my account, but have not heard anything. I have switched to WordPress.com. I still think Orgfree is great to try out different website management interfaces. They just have not given me any support.