It never ceases to amaze me how often you make useful connections whilst doing a spot of web research on something else entirely. Yesterday morning I was thinking about a couple of non-work related topics. I’m on my local parish council (that’s the third tier of UK local government, and nothing to do with Churches), and I was thinking about ways we could use wiki technology to help us do a better job. Around about the same time I was discussing my wife’s college with her. She’s deputy principal of a sixth form college, Albany College, in North London, and we were thinking of how to improve the school, and ways they should market and position for next year.
I sat down at the PC to try to answer a question on my new Blackberry. I was looking for ways to enhance the task management, which is very basic compared to my desktop application (the only flaw in Blackberry OS that I’ve found so far). I came across this unofficial Blackberry Wiki, which looks fairly recently started, has some useful content and links. It didn’t answer my question, but I looked at the wiki itself, a hosted service from Wikispaces. This seemed to ring a faint bell, but I did some investigation. As well as finding out more about the product (see later), I spotted a news item where one of the founders presented at a NetSquared event on 11 April. This gathering was a forum for Web 2.0 technologists, non-profit professionals, philanthropists, and other people interested in remixing the Internet for social change. Interestingly, one of the other speakers was Tara Hunt. Coincidentally, I’d been directed to read her HorsePigCow blog only the day before from an item on Scoble’s blog. You can find the podcast of what Adam Frey, one of the founders of Wikispaces, said at the NetSquared meeting here.
I find that Wikispaces is a service that is positioning itself to make wiki technology easy and accessible for everyone, including teachers, non-profit organisations, commercial organisations, anyone. Whereas Jotspot or QEDwiki are application wikis that can do more, Wikispaces aims to do the basics of editing a web page for a non-technical person well, and not much more than that. I found this great explanation from Vicki Davis of how she started to use wiki technology at Westwood Schools. It happens to be about a project with her students on Web 2.0 technology itself, but it is a great story showing how wiki technology can be applied in teaching. My wife had heard about more technologically switched on (and richer) schools doing this kind of thing, but thought it would be beyond her college’s resources. We now know we can start something for her at zero cost, and it will be one of the new initiatives we were trying to think of for her school. I’ve also found something that I can use for Sandridge Parish Council. The Wikispaces pricing model is straightforward. Public wikis are free (with ads from Google); private and ad-free wikis are $5/month or $50/year. An account where you can create an unlimited number of ad-free, private wikis costs $100/month or $1000/year. Teachers can get a private ad-free wiki for free.
My first impressions of Wikispaces is very good. It has all of the basics, with a nice interface to upload and attach files, or integrate a Blogger or Typepad account in to the wiki. I’ll be making use of it for various things over the coming weeks, so I’ll post more comments about my experiences later. But these connections you make are just great.
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