For today’s class students have made the first drafts of their video “trailers” and have an idea what they want their projects to be about. We’re going to look at the videos, and discuss ideas. We’ll also begin putting ideas together – I’ve set up a shared site (a wiki with simpler editing) in Wetpaint so we can all easily add text. So far Wetpaint seems kind of slow and full of ads but if we like using it I’ll upgrade to get rid of the ads. When we can see everyone’s ideas it will be easier to see where the gaps are and what other kinds of research we need to think about. I know some people are still struggling to figure out what they want to do, so this should be helpful for them too!
As a reminder, here’s our stuff:
- Our Netvibes page with the latest blog posts (and videos) and links to Diigo
- The syllabus and schedule
- Our Wetpaint site with collated project ideas
- Tasks due in the next few weeks
- Form for entering info about five research articles each
Andy Coverdale
As one of a team of student interns with the Visual Learning Lab at the University of Nottingham, I recently set up a wiki in Wetpaint for our collaborative research work. Due to the confidentiality of some our data the site is private, but you may be interested in our experiences with it.
Overall, Wetpaint was very easy to set up and to invite members – we were up and running in no time. However the group have raised a number of user issues: Whilst page updates are recorded, one cannot revert back to specific stages, the ‘Recent Site Activity’ drop-down menu (a useful feature) frequently breaks down, and there is no page autosave. I use Google Sites for my own wiki (http://sites.google.com/site/andycoverdale/) and personally, I would recommend it over Wetpaint, but I’d be interested in how you get on.
An additional problem with collaborative writing and editing of texts (that is not specific to Wetpaint) is the need to reliably identify contributions. We started using different colour fonts, but in Wetpaint at least, only 3 or 4 colours are readable.
By the way, Wetpaint do remove ads on request if you are using the site for educational purposes (it may take them a week or so) so you may not need to upgrade.
Jill Walker Rettberg
Thanks for the tips, Andy – I’ve sent Wetpaint an email to ask about removing ads. I’ve since discovered that our university does offer pre-built hosted wikis, which would be just as good – but I think I’ll go with Wetpaint this semester, both because I already made students sign up for it and because I suspect that not having to learn the slightly bizarre formatting codes of the Meidawiki system might be helpful in getting students active.
Of course Google Docs might have worked as well – or Google Sites, I haven’t looked at their Wiki features.
Jill Walker Rettberg
Hm. Wetpaint discontinued their ad-free education program. We might simply switch to Google Docs – everyone editing our annotated bibliography worked beautifully there.