Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Confluence is an application wiki similar to Jot.com. It is free for individual use (up to 2 users) but relatively pricey for academic use (25 users, $600 per year).

I have used Jot.com before, it’s arrangement of 20 free wiki pages for up to 5 users seems better suited for academic term projects, since you can have different students in the group use their own login id and thereby track their contributions and non-contributions to the collaborative wiki effort.

The wiki I helped create with others on Jot.com a year ago is titled “Student Cell Phone Use and Other Technology Concerns for Schools” and still available online. I would guess Confluence won’t get many educational project beta testers because of the limit on just 2 users for the free version, but it might be worth a test as an individual wiki. I have not forayed into this like others have including Bud the Teacher.

Glypho is a cool interactive writing site, designed for multi-party novel authorship. I have created an account and started writing a new story called “The Web 2.0 Teacher Who Could.” Like many other web applications, the javascript WYSIWYG editing did not work in my Safari web browser, but works great in Firefox. After you publish an initial story starter, you have to wait for the site authors to approve it before you can solict contributions from others. This process seemed to be pretty immediate for me. Here is my story starter:

Once upon a time, in a place very close to your home, there was a teacher with a difficult problem. She wanted to help her students become good writers, and come to school each day excited about learning, but the school district did its best to stop her.

When she tried to help students get connected with a global audience by setting up a teacher-blog for student writing, the school district honchos said, “You can’t do that. Blogs are bad and not safe.”

When she tried to setup a videoconference with students in another classroom across the country, the school district IT nazis said, “Our firewall has those ports blocked and we won’t open them. We don’t support desktop videoconferencing.”

When she tried to setup a classroom podcast so her students could publish their thoughts for parents, relatives, and others in the community, she was told, “We don’t have a district policy on podcasting yet. Don’t set that up yet, we are not sure what the issues are.”

So the teacher become very frustrated. She had read that web 2.0 technologies could be really transformational in the classroom: they could help students engage in the writing process more effectively and with greater motivation than they ever had before. But her efforts in this quest kept being foiled. She was unsure where to turn next.

If you’d like to contribute to my fun, interactive writing experiment, you can suggest a character, suggest a plot, write a chapter, or suggest a title. Click here to link to my Glypho project, you’ll need to sign up and create an account to contribute.

I found both these new read/write web services on Richard MacManus’ ZDNet blog called Web 2.0 Explorer.

On this day..

• USS Oklahoma Memorial Dedication - 2007
• December 6th videoconference from Pearl Harbor - 2007
• Broadband Boot Camp for Educators - 2007
• Please ask them to podcast, coach! - 2006
• Great preschool and elementary websites - 2006
• Connected schools, not much blended learning - 2006
• Discovery Education field managers fired - 2006

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 1:46 am and is filed under creativity, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.