Links: Duke University Wiki, Writely gets positive review from AP writer, review of Web2.0 tools for students

Oct 7, 2006

Links: Duke University Wiki, Writely gets positive review from AP writer, review of Web2.0 tools for students

Writely gets positive review from Associated Press writer – Jessica Mintz, a Business Writer for the Associated Press, reviews Writely and finds it to be a solid writing and collaboration tool, albeit with a little polishing needed in a few places. “Writely stores documents without assigning any particular format. Users who want to download the document to their hard drives can save as HTML, rich text, Word, OpenOffice or Portable Document Format files.” This is an important point because it illustrates the real importance of the Internet to information. Web-based tools keep information format-independent which is better for knowledge construction, and also makes it easier to output that information in the optimal format depending on how it will be used.
She also makes an important point about collaboration: “In the past, if five people needed to edit a report, some poor soul was stuck making sure changes were incorporated into one master document. With Writely, documents can be shared by sending an e-mail invitation to any number of people. All can work on the same page simultaneously; Writely saves often and keeps track of revisions, highlighting changes and additions from different editors in bright colors.”
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0 – Brian Benzinger, a fellow 9rules member, is writing a 3 part series on Web 2.0 tools that students might find useful. He covers a wide range of tools, including, organization, presentation, collaboration, to do list, gradebook, and resume writing to name just a few. Wiki tools like JotSpot and Writely (I consider Writely a very wiki-like tool although it’s officially a web word processor) are included in his reviews. Overall, this is a very useful guide to what’s available.
Duiki: The Wiki of Duke University – “Duiki stems from the ideas of several individuals for implementing a freely accessible, freely editable, and extremely user-friendly website where useful and entertaining information about the city and the university can be collected. The central concept of Duiki is the ability for anyone to create an illustrated “entry” describing a place, event, person, or idea related to Duke, and make it possible for others to find and reference the entry in order to organize and build on the content.”