Using Internet Technologies for Group Projects

I have mentioned Stewart Mader in the past – he writes a blog on using wikis in education. He posted an artile today on using a wiki to work collaborative group projects. Here is a quote from his post;

Often groups collaborate on a document by “pushingâ€? it out to each member – emailing a file that each person edits on his or her computer, and some attempt is made to coordinate the edits so everyone’s work is equally represented. But what happens when two people think of the same idea and include it in different ways in their respective copies of the file, or when one group member misses an agreed upon time to finish their changes and pass on the file to the next member? Who decides what to do? Using a wiki “pullsâ€? the group members together to build and edit the document on a wiki page, which strengthens the community within the group, allows group members with overlapping or similar ideas to see and collaboratively build on each other’s work. It also allows all group members immediate, equal access to the most recent version of the document.

Well that all sounds fine and dandy Andy but I don’t have a wiki! So what do I do?

There are some great free services on the web that can help you here. Let’s look at one…

http://pbwiki.com/

At pbwiki you can create your own wiki in seconds – really… Just add your site name (example: tyndaletry) and tell them your email address – done – well they do want you to confirm your email address. Once you confirm you are asked to supply a password (only those who know the password can edit the site), whether or not the wiki should be publicly viewable (or only with password) and then to agree to their terms of service. After you answer these 3 questions you are done!

Here is a tip – in the drop down box labeled “what is this wiki for?” choose education. They will then give you 3 templates to work from – one being “Create a Group Project”

At this point you can create new pages and start working on your project! Editing your wiki is really quite easy and there is a full tutorial online for you to look at.

Just want to play? Well I have actually added the wiki we used as an example above. You can go to:

http://tyndaletry.pbwiki.com/

and poke around… If you want to edit anything or setup a new page feel free! The password is “tyndale”