We feel wikis are more befitting to the challenge you proposed. You stated that you wanted something so students and teachers can collaborate. We felt that blogs were more of a personal journal, and wikis allowed more of what we wanted. In fact, we felt wikis could also be used to eliminate the need for a website. Teachers would be able to post the assignment sheet online, for instance, and add whatever they would have added to their website. Now, however, teachers would be able to post an article, a poem, an essay…whatever they choose. Students would then be able to comment. It works the other way as well. Students can post some of their work, and have that peer edited along with comments by the teacher as well. Students can also collaborate on a group project; it is much easier to do all this on a wiki. There were some issues that we dealt with.
An issue was the actual writing of the text. Some use a different format, in which you would have to insert symbols before a word which would determine its size, or whether it was bolded or italicized. As this would be more difficult, we decided that WYSIWYG would be easier on the teachers. We found many good ones, including one powered by MediaWiki which had a familiar Wikipedia type interface, however it was not WYSIWYG and therefore it was dropped. In addition we narrowed down to wikis that were free. Many of these free wikis were intended for collaboration. In a blog, it is harder to collaborate. As long as the teacher trusts the students, the wiki may remain open, so students can contribute. In a blog, the teacher would have to manually create a writing privilege for all the students, or the students would have to collaborate though the comments area. However, this exposes a flaw with wikis; anyone can change the material on a page. Permissions can be set; however, they are up to the teacher. Blogs were more of a journal we found, and any way of collaboration was an afterthought.
All day yesterday we researched wikis, testing each one. Our main source was TechCrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=196, http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/06/wetpaint-best-wiki-software-so-far/, and a wikibook on Wikipedia http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki. We tested the following wikis,
1. Atwiki
2. BluWiki
3. Cospire
4. EditThis.info
5. ElWiki
6. MemeBot
7. OddWiki
8. PBwiki
9. Riters
10. Schtuff
11. SeedWiki
12. ServerSideWiki
13. Wikia
14. Wikihost
15. XWiki
16. JotSpot
17. Stikipad
18. Wikifido, ended up being a wiki for dogs
19. Wikispaces
20. Wetpaint
The last two, Wikispaces, and Wetpaint are the ones we consider to fit our needs. Both are WYSIWYG, and are easy to use. More on these on my next post, that will be better for teachers interested in this concept.
