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Are blogs or wikis right for you? What steps are involved? |
There are lots of popular, free services on the internet to start up a blog or wiki site. These services will host your blog or wiki site, which eliminates the need for you to download and install any software. As a member of a web-hosted community you can also tap into a large network.
Trainers have found that it is worth spending time investigating the different service providers and their tools, as they vary in terms of the tool features, support, ability to adapt the site, the community of users, etc. Here are some popular and free services:
Take a tour of Blogger at: https://www.blogger.com/start
Take a tour of Edublogs at: http://www.edublogs.org/
Get a quick overview of the features of WordPress at: http://wordpress.com/
Tour Wikispaces at: http://www.wikispaces.com/
There are also blog and wiki tools (site ‘engines’) that can be downloaded and installed on a web server of your choosing, such as your organisation’s intranet. For some popular downloadable tools see ‘More resources’ in this guide.
Many services are currently free to use but you need to join the service (eg ‘create an account’ or ‘sign up’). You’ll need an email address to sign up as a member. Once you’ve joined, you can start creating within minutes (starting with a default template). Your contact details are not available to anyone who comes across your site unless you elect to make them available. You create a site by giving it a name – this will become your URL or internet address so that others can access it.
The person who first creates the site (the site administrator) decides who will have access to visit, edit and manage the space, so you’ll be able to choose who can view and edit your content or space. For example, there may be up to four levels of control over this from ‘private’ or ‘closed’ (only viewed by your approved ‘members’) to ‘public’ or ‘open’ (anyone can view or edit or leave comments). A nominal fee may be charged for some site conditions such as ‘ad free’. The more open you allow a site to be, the greater the potential audience and social networking. However an open space exposes content to anyone, so potential risks to privacy and security also need to be considered.
The service provider will give you a link to a tour of the site, a step-by-step guide, or tutorial to help you to sign up and use the features. If you don’t like reading online tutorials an experienced colleague, student or friend could show you the basics in a few minutes. Trainers recommend taking the time to experiment with the tool before setting up the real thing for your teaching purpose and inviting students to join. If you are also willing to investigate the various ‘accessories’ available for adding to a site, like RSS feeds, a voting tool or an online calendar, then your time investment will grow accordingly.
Blogs and wikis are relatively quick to get the hang of when compared to a software package for web authoring. A knowledge of basic word processing (or whatever type of document that the tool is providing) can transfer intuitively to the online version. You can start writing to the web page without knowing how to use more advanced features such as uploading files (like Word documents, images or audio files) or managing membership and networking features.
After setting up the site you can invite ‘members’ who can also sign up to the service and view and/or edit the site depending on the permissions you give them. Members can invite other members to join. For wiki members who have signed up to service you’ll be able to see their usernames listed as ‘space members’ and every contribution or edit they make will be stored in a ‘history’ log against their name.
There’s no guarantee exactly how long a third party provider will continue to host your free site but the subscriptions to free services don’t have an expiry date as yet. You can look for a tool that allows you to export the content to a particular document format so you can keep a back-up of the content or move it to another service. You can also delete a site, or elect to close it to public view, if you need to.
Your organisation may have a policy or standards on usage of web-based tools that you should look into. Your organisation may be planning to provide you with a tool that can be used within the closed community of your institution, company or vocational community.
The variety of web-based tools is also increasing at a fast rate, so you can keep discovering new tools with hybrid features or innovative ways to communicate and present content.