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To my surprise, I’m still recommending PBWorks to teachers as a good way to get started using a wiki. That’s because the Moodle wiki is still not a very effective tool, and PBWorks is easy-to-use and provides some good features for developing and formatting content. It’s proprietary, of course, so it has to be used with caution, but it’s a good way to get started.

When I’m introducing teachers to the potential of wikis and other web tools, I naturally start by getting them to set up and work with wikis themselves. It seems to me like a set of core skills – how to plan and put together a collection of linked pages. This can be applied in reflective individual writing or as a collaborative exercise.

Here’s a 3-page PDF document on how to get started with PBWorks. It’s covered by the by-nc-sa licence so you are welcome to download and use it as you see fit provided it’s not used commercially and my authorship is attributed.

If you modify or adapt it, please add a comment to this post with a link to the new version.

BigBlueButton is an open source tool that provides:

• Text chat
• Webcam support
• Audio discussion
• Shared desktop
• Shared presentation

You don’t need to install anything to check it out, there’s a working demo available:

I did find what seems to be a small bug using Firefox (Mac OS): the placement of minimised tools is not quite right, the thumbnail is pushed too far to the left of the screen and is hard to find. Other than that, it seems to work really well, and it seems to have lots of potential.

What I really like about BigBlueButton:

• It’s very simple – the interface is much more straightforward than (say) Wimba Classroom. Admittedly it appears to have fewer features but it has enough to be a very effective tool for synchronous learning and teaching.
• There’s a Moodle integration available – that’s a big plus that should ensure its uptake.
• The moderator and presenter roles are clearly defined. My first impression was that ‘viewers’ had not enough control and were limited to passive learning, but it seems easy to share control of the various tools and enable active learning modes.
• There are clear tutorials and help files available.
• Did I mention it’s open source? And the authors seem to be doing everything right with the project: there’s a published API and open issue tracking and version control.

Given its simplicity of use, I think learners will have fewer problems in using it than they currently do with some of the proprietary systems. Overall, this seems a great tool and one I’ll be following closely.

Learning and teaching online, especially when using learning community approaches, places an emphasis on writing. This may involve writing in discussion forums, wikis, blogs, or more specialised tools such as the Moodle database. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of read-write activities for learning.

But writing online can be a nightmare for teachers and students who are familiar with the web as an information resource but are new to creating content online. There are a number of pitfalls: what is a relatively simple task when using desktop software can be very problematic when using an online editor such as those found in blogs, wikis or LMS software. But most problems can be avoided by using a few simple techniques:

1. Never paste from a Word document. You can end up with garbage text like that shown in the illustration, or other formatting problems that are not easy to fix. If your text is in Word, copy and paste it into a text editor first (such as Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in OSX), then copy and paste that into the online editor. All the formatting will be lost, but you’ll have a clean copy without problematic formatting.
2. Never press the ‘Submit’ button without a backup. While you were writing, the LMS may have logged you out, or your network connection or session may have been lost. You can spend a long time composing a thoughtful reflective response to a forum posting, or composing an informative web page, then lose your work when you submit. A simple strategy is to select and copy all the text before you click submit. That way, if your work is not submitted, you can paste into another editor and try again. And if what you have written is really worth keeping, consider saving it as a text file to your hard disk – just in case!
3. Don’t worry about formatting – at least at first. Most of the WYSIWYG editors built into LMS or CMS software are idiosyncratic at best, so get your thoughts onto the screen and leave putting in the bulleted lists etc to last. If you’re used to writing using desktop software, lower your expectations – your formatting options are much diminished using most online editors. And if you’re reluctant to give up a lot of text formatting, you’ll also find it helpful to know how to use a few formatting tags – HTML or wiki markup – for those occasions when the editor gets confused and you just need to make a few changes to the source code.

Teachers and learners can get really frustrated and turned off the use of LMS and other online software if they lose work or can’t format it they way they want. We need to predict that these sorts of problems will occur and inform teachers and learners how to avoid them beforehand.

In an earlier post I discussed how Apple’s software development efforts seem very focused on consumption of media.

I’m interested in learning which incorporates producing information (not just consuming it) and which makes effective use of Web 2.0 tools to publish, not just to read. Given the iPad currently appears to have pretty much the same features as an oversized iPod Touch, the software limitations are likely to parallel those of the iPod. These include:

• The only multitasking available seems to be that music can be played in the background while you use other apps. So moving content from one app to another is clumsy. Given the size of the iPod, this is not such a big deal. But if I purchased the much bigger iPad, I’d expect it to be more suitable for productive work such as editing web-based content.
• Many web-based systems use WYSIWYG editors for creating and editing content. These are not available using the current iPod OS, so editing is restricted to plain text – unless you can use markup. This affects all kinds of web-based systems used in education: Moodle, PBWorks, Blackboard, Mediawiki, etc. In a wiki you can use wiki markup to get around this, otherwise you’ll need to use HTML. Either way, this will be seen as a big step backward by many educators and learners!

There are many apps which allow the user to access content as consumer but few apps which allow authoring. One that I really like is the WordPress blogging app which allows me to create and edit posts and pages and manage comments. Like WordPress, it’s simple, straightforward and effective. But notice from the screenshot above (on an iPod Touch) that the editor shows only source code (HTML). Now I work in that mode most of the time anyway, but I know many of the teachers I work with would see the loss of the WYSIWYG editor as a return to the dark ages!

Since the iPad is not yet available, my comments are merely predictions based on the current technology. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect the first iPads will not solve these problems. My advice to teachers: if you are using Web 2.0 tools or an LMS such as Moodle, you may not find a shiny new iPad is a suitable platform for creating and editing content. Unless of course you are prepared to learn some markup!

Apple seems to be fully committed to intensive development of its iTunes-related software features to the detriment of other features. If you own a Mac or iPod/ iPhone for listening to music and watching videos, you’ll be happy. But if you also want to get on with managing your life, work and information, you’re likely to find the bundled Apple software a bit disappointing.

On the Mac, the standard Apple Mail software bundled with OS 10.6 seems to have changed little… it still has the same irritating bugs and limited features it had in 10.4. And iCal still has many limitations – it’s really quite a basic application. These Mac OS desktop applications feel like add-ons and don’t appear to have had much in the way of development effort for several years now.

And if you own an iPod Touch or iPhone with the latest OS, you can’t even sync your tasks with iCal. To be able to do this effectively, you’ll have to buy an app such as Appigo’s ToDo – luckily like most apps it’s pretty cheap. It provides much better features for managing your ToDo list than iCal does. But since it’s not allowed to talk to iCal directly when syncing, it has to sync separately. It does this over wireless with its own desktop application running on your Mac, which itself syncs with iCal. Not a big problem, but it’s all a bit clumsy.

If the much-heralded Apple tablet does appear next week as the rumours suggest, it’s likely to be attractive to users who want it for work as well as play. But unless the software bundled with it is much improved on what’s available now, they’re likely to find its usefulness is limited.