Saturday, March 2, 2013

Blogs and Wikis

I have belatedly looked at this exercise, weeks after starting my blog. It helped to clarify some of the differences between blogs and wikis. I have found Blogger quite easy to use, and would be interested in maybe using it in a class in the future, if the logistics wouldn't be too awful.

I have experience using a Wiki from an NEH summer seminar I went to hosted by Bard Graduate School. They use Wiki.dot, so I got a bit of experience using that. I found it a little more confusing than the Blogger, but I imagine if I used it regularly, that would go away. Interestingly enough, a number of the professors there use Wikis to organize their courses and for student assignments and such. I thought it was pretty cool the way they did that, but the tech guy there pointed out that you would have to have strong tech support for both set-up and maintenance. So I am skeptical of its efficacy at Fredonia. Of course, Bard's is a very small, graduate student only program, and one with the $$ to hire amazing tech support!

1 comment:

  1. Hey, Ellen:

    RIght now, there is not a Wiki environment that is supported at Fredonia. There IS a Wiki in ANGEL, but it is really not a functional venue.

    I have used WetPaint alot, in the day when it was ad-free for educators. It was a GREAT way to keep students active in contributing ongoing content. But WetPaint has gotten flukey, and I disbanded it when I adopted GoogleDocs, etc. a few years before our campus transitioned. I have found - since then - that using GoogleSites sites as Wikis and/or embedding GoogleDocs can have pretty much similar functionality. These tools ARE supported by our campus...so this is where I would go, if I wanted campus support.

    There are also several free Wiki services that you may wish to experiment with (the popular ones are summarized on the TOEP site)...but - you are right - you will not be supported by campus IT/PDC efforts. If you are interested in exploring these, lemme know, and we can plan some time together, OK?

    Thanks for keepin in!
    ~kg

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