Web Applications: Wikispaces

[Originally posted on my old blog, On My Mac, on 11/1/2007]

I have begun to experiment with applications on the web that I can access through my web browser.

The most useful one for me at this point is a wiki that I share with my wife and son to keep track of our family projects. I began it in August when they were in Europe, I was in Washington, DC, and we had an unexpected big change in our lives: my son won a scholarship to a leading arts school in Massachusetts. We were in different time zones, and the number of issues to resolve and details to consider were too complicated to handle through email. I drew inspiration from an excellent wiki tutorial I had seen earlier and gave it a try.

I chose Wikispaces, which has free and paid options. The cheapest paid option was necessary for us in order to insure our privacy with a secure login. The paid version was also attractive because it had no ads, and it was cheaper than the other main contender, pbwiki. The fact that I could try the paid version without providing any credit card information sealed the deal. Four weeks later I paid for a subscription.

Now my son has settled into school in Massachusetts, and my wife and I work in different places in the Washington, DC area, but we all work with the same wiki, which has evolved into a family web notebook with hyperlinks. We have some group pages for specific family projects and individual pages for our own stuff. We also keep some reference pages with addresses, bookmarks, and memos. We do not keep highly sensitive information on it, however. It is secure, but there is not need to take unnecessary risks.

Here are a few features I like:

• Discussion tab on each page, like on Wikipedia, enabling us to discuss the content of a specific page and have a record of the discussion with that content.
• Recent changes link in the menu, which lets me see at a glance what's happened since my last visit.
• RSS feeds for pages I want to keep close track of.
• Ability to upload and link files.
• Ability to embed media.
• Ability to download the wiki and back it up in text files both in wiki markup and HTML. The first is a good fail-safe. The latter ensures I'll have access to the data via a web browser even if I decide to leave Wikispaces.
• WYSIWYG editor.

Working with this web application is slower than working on a comparable desktop application, but the collaborative features are worth it.

One consideration for some Mac users: Wikispaces works on both Safari and Firefox, but its WYSIWYG editor only works in Firefox. If Safari is a must for you, try the more expensive pbwiki.

My experience with Wikispaces has been positive enough to consider integrating it into a class, though I am not sure how yet. If I do, I would also consider using pbwiki, because it has free options for educators.

Three online wiki services: wikispaces, pbwiki, and wetpaint. Simple wiki tutorial: Wikis in Plain English. If you want your own wiki, but don't need to collaborate, you might try VoodooPad, an amazing little desktop application for the Mac.

Wikispaces Update for Teachers

[This post originally appeared in a somewhat longer version on my Mac blog on 12/10/2008.]

If you use Wikispaces for teaching, you might want to close the wiki to everyone but members of your class. If you do that, the problem of setting up accounts arises. Sure, everyone could set up her own account, but some will have trouble, some will take forever to do it, and others will use names you don't recognize. And once they've signed up, you still have to add them to the wiki.

Fortunately, with Wikispaces it is possible to set your students usernames and passwords yourself with the help of the friendly folks at Wikispaces. (I say friendly, because they answer email queries in a prompt and helpful manner.) Here are the directions.

Wikispaces customer service explained to me that I can also delete accounts if I have the passwords. I doubt I would do that, though, because the students might end up signing up for other wikis or even creating one of their own, and I do not want to cause havoc. Moreover, it should not be necessary to delete their accounts. All I have to do is remove them from the membership of my wiki. In fact, I should probably advise my students to change their passwords after I give them their accounts, so that I do not have access to anything else they do on Wikispaces outside of my course.