Do wikis make a difference in the way students collaborate?

As more universities adopt web 2.0 technology, administrators want to know exactly how students are using these tool and what benefits they bring. Campus Technology addressed this question in their latest article “Wikis, Blogs, & More, Oh My!’

Here are two different ways Universities are using wikis, and their results:

Professor Kane at Boston University encourages students to submit their own exam questions via his Exam Question Workspace wiki. In a year, students submitted a whopping 600 questions overall.

At SUNY-Delhi, CIO Patrick Masson uses wikis to assist in policy decision-making. Masson says user response to this approach has been overwhelming. Over the course of one month, the school’s president made 73 edits, the coordinator of online learning made 58, the chair of budget and planning made 31, and the vice president of student housing made 29.

Here are three more suggestions from PBwiki educators:Continue reading “Do wikis make a difference in the way students collaborate?”

What we really work on at PBwiki

My new flip video arrived today, and I decided to interview some folks at the office. I asked what they are REALLY working on and I received some enthusiastic responses!

Stay tuned for some more quick videos from my flip camera. What do you want to know from the PBwiki team? Leave your questions for our next video in the comments!

If you’re interested in joining this wild and crazy team, see what positions we have open at http://pbworks.com/content/jobs

Getting a "read only" message?

[9:09pm] If you’re getting a “read only” message on your wiki, our engineers are performing unscheduled maintenance and are currently working to restore full wiki access. We estimate restoring full access by 1am PST.

Your data is safe.

We’ll continue updating this post with the newest developments. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and we’ll respond right away.

[11:37pm] We’ve revised our timeline and expect to restore full access to wikis by 4am PST. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please see some of the Q&A in the comments (below). If you have any other questions, please leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

[1:42am] Great news: We’ve restored access to your wikis. You should be able to access your wiki now.

If you have any questions or notice any irregularities, please click “Help” in your wiki. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience — we all worked around the clock to restore full access to your wikis.

Use wikis to build your online classroom

Our educators portal has some great examples of teachers actively using wikis to build class networks, improve student learning and encourage open discussion and collaboration.

But how did all these teachers get to this point?

If you find yourself asking this question, we’re here to help! Tune in to tomorrow’s webinar to find out the best way build your own remote classroom and engage your students

We’re going to share community tips on classroom management, building a classroom community, and how to design group work on your wiki. Learn how to use our new PBwiki 2.0 features to create private team pages, change student access controls, and more.

You can sign up for our webinar here.

Free tools to drive adoption of PBwiki within your organization

So you’ve created your first PBwiki.  Now the question is, how do you get the rest of your organization to adopt it?

We’re here to help.  Just this week, I held a webinar on “Driving Adoption of PBwiki“.  For an hour, we talked about how you can use the four keys to driving adoption (structure, resources, workflow, and rewards) to make PBwiki an integral part of how your team works.

If you missed the webinar, no worries, the recording is available here.  And even if you don’t have a full hour to watch the webinar, you can go to the Driving Adoption Wiki, download my full presentation ( AdoptingPBwiki.ppt) and learn at your own pace.

Good luck!

PBwiki needs alpha testers

Feeling adventurous? We’re building a team of PBwiki users to help us test out new features before they go live for everyone. We need about 100 testers who know their way around a wiki and aren’t afraid of the cutting edge.

If you’re interested in trying out new things ahead of time, don’t mind the occasional glitch, and are interested in giving us feedback, you can apply here. We can’t wait to hear from you.

New PBwiki feature: Footnotes

PBwiki now supports footnotes. Whether you’re using PBwiki for research, collaborative writing, or organization, there are always lots of little details that you need to keep track of — places where sticking little snippets of text and references would be handy. Here’s a quick sample:

Sample footnotes

To insert a footnote: Click Insert Plugin >> PBwiki Magic >> Footnote. Insert as many footnotes as you need.

This feature works for PBwiki 1.0 and 2.0. Please let us know what you think! Feedback is always welcome.

Read about PBwiki in InformationWeek

InformationWeek just came out with a great article on the impact of Web 2.0 collaboration tools like PBwiki on the role of IT.  Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service represent a major paradigm shift for IT managers, but as InformationWeek puts it:

“You can ignore Web 2.0 tools, or try to shoo users away. If you take one of these approaches, let us know how it works out for you. A better approach is to embrace new collaboration methods, whether through an in-house deployment, a software-as-a-service option, or both.”

Longtime customer and FOP (friend-of-PBwiki) Doug Cornelius also had some nice quotes about PBwiki versus SharePoint:

“It’s a classic story of enterprise 2.0,” says Goodwin Procter’s Cornelius. “We’re up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year.” Fact is, users will find ways to make their working lives more convenient–with or without the input of IT. This is particularly true when it comes to Web collaboration tools.

Music to our ears. 

Using PBwiki to manage your projects

We just finished up another great webinar today, focused on using PBwiki for project management.  We spent an hour going over how you can use PBwiki templates and folders to build your own project management system, and answered a whole bunch of questions from users.

To watch this and other recorded webinars, or to sign up for future webinars, be sure to visit our webinars page.

New email notifications for your PBwiki 2.0

When PBwiki 2.0 launched, it included lots of great new features, but one thing stayed exactly the same: the notification emails you got when somebody changed a page on your wiki.

We fixed that today — here is a sneak preview of the new version of notifications.

Sample notification

The new notifications…

  • Let you see all changes made to your wiki
  • Have shorter change logs, and are easier to read
  • Respect your notification settings
  • Won’t be marked as spam!

To get a sneak preview of these new notifications, go to your wiki settings and check the box that says “Sneak preview new version of notifications”

Keep in mind that they’re not quite done yet, so if you have any problems, just turn off the sneak preview (and be sure to send us feedback). Enjoy!