Work @ TAFE

After evaluating and using Drupal over the past month or so as a possible package that could be used to facilitate a collaborative resource development, we’ve ended up going for something simpler and cheaper: A free solution hosted by Wikispaces - check out the beginnings of our resource at http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/ - you can even edit/update it yourself - it’s almost as easy as editing a word document!.

Away from Drupal

Drupal is a fantastic open source collaborative development environment, that certainly lives up to it’s name: “Community plumbing”, but there are some inherent drawbacks for our idea of building a simple resource to help educators start using the free and easy tools of the web.

1. It needs to be hosted (costing money). Although James at IncSub has generously given us our own drupal hosting for free… it may not be a great long-term solution if the traffic increases etc.
2. Drupal takes quite a bit of setting up and configuration, which leads to the next point:
3. The medium is the message: We don’t want to use a system to deliver the resource that other teachers/educators can’t easily use for themselves.
4. Drupal doesn’t currently provide a great revision-tracking system of pages, which effectively means that we need to get potential contributors to create an account and login to make any changes to the resource. One of the ingredients to the success of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can edit a page, without the hassle of logging in.

…And on to Wikispaces

These four points led us back to the excellent free resource: Wikispaces. Wikispaces allows anyone to create their own domain (ours is http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/). We can create and edit any number of pages, include pictures etc., all for free. Anyone can come along and improve/build-on the resource with ease - encouraging participation - yet there is a also great revision-tracking system that allows us to monitor the changes being made and revert them if necessary.

So I spent a large part of the past week or so transferring our work to the BlendedLearning Wikispace area. Thanks to Jude Cooke and Ian Bailey for there work on the Blog bar image .

I’m hoping to use a TAFE WSI logo for the site, instead of the default pot-plant, but need to find out a bit more about this. So, for now we now have the beginnings of a resource that can be continually improved and updated by its users. I’ll be using the resource as part of a training activity this Thursday (and, most probably, updating it afterwards with improvements!).

Previous ‘weekly’ reports:

• Weekly report 3 - 5th May 2005
• Weekly report 2 - 21st April 2005
• Weekly report 1 - 31st March 2005
• Initial outline of project idea - 22nd March 2005