So… if you’re given a wiki to take notes into to share with your classmates, and you’re typing notes, why would you not type notes into the wiki? Lots of typing and at least some visible notetaking last week, but nothing in the wiki. So… I’m back to being the class notetaker. Mumble. Yay for sharing! Grumble. (And I’m a lousy notetaker… the rest of the class deserves better.)
(Admittedly the text editor for twiki is pretty bad, but… urgh. It isn’t that hard.)
(And admittedly this would all be way better if we had actual collaborative editing, instead of having to ‘assign’ it to someone every week. But still….)
[…] This is what I took a stab at during my talk(?) at GNUnify2008. And was ever so surprised to find that the students use a combination of IM and Google Docs to swap notes. […]
Have you tried the ‘obby’ programs (gobby/sobby/etc)?
It’s a great collaborative editing system.
Martijn: I have, but it has (relative to webapps) a high barrier to entry and to publication post-class. Still nice, though.
We hear you Luis and will soon have a solution based on abicollab
Stay tuned, it should be ready within a month.
Hi Luis,
It doesn’t really solve the problem you speak of, but you might find a FF extension like It’s All Text[1] to be of some use for easing some of the pain of featureless web forms like the TWiki editor. I’m sure you probably use something like this already, but thought it was worth mentioning :). Cheers.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
Martin: eeeeenteresting.
dcraven: The problem in this particular case is twiki’s really bizarro markup; I’ll look at It’s All Text but unless it has twiki-specific markup support it won’t really help the core problem.
I see. I misunderstood the problem as an issue with non-rich text boxes in general. The addon I mentioned simply lets you use an external editor more easily. In turn, the chosen editor can support TWiki syntax in the form of appropriate highlighting. It helps a bit, but is not a solution. Cheers.
I may have missed some previous reason against using it.. but google docs support collaborative editing..
[…] This is what I took a stab at during my talk(?) at GNUnify2008. And was ever so surprised to find that the students use a combination of IM and Google Docs to swap notes. […]
Brutal. Classes that don’t actually work together are lame. Maybe the above suggestion about Google Docs might work?