• 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.”

In his recent post about my blog, Christian Long commented that he’d like to know how I podcast every blog entry: “Want to figure out how he manages to podcast every single blog entry.  Robots or his own time/energy?  Either way, I’m intrigued…and envious, too!” (think:lab, 1 Sept 2006)

Since you asked, I’ll reveal how I do it! Last spring, I discovered a tool called Talkr, which takes the RSS feed from your blog and uses  some very good text-to-speech technology to create audio files. It didn’t take me long to set up a free account and submit my RSS feed. Then I added a small bit of code to my blog template to create the “Listen to this Podcast” button you see at the top of each post which links to the corresponding audio file. Next, I submitted my podcast feed to the iTunes podcast directory, and created a page http://www.ikiw.org/podcast that gives readers information on how to subscribe to the podcast using iTunes or other podcast aggregators.

Besides being a natural complement to the blog, it also makes my blog more accessible for people who have to rely on audio either due to visual impairment or very demanding schedules. I hope you like it!

Just wanted to say thank you the the bloggers who’ve spoken highly of Using Wiki in Education recently-

• teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk – …Doug Belshaw’s teaching-related blog: news, resources and ideas for busy teachers! Doug’s site is a great resource and I’m adding it to my blogroll!
• 9rules Network Official Blog – thanks to the 9rules Network for accepting Using Wiki in Education as a member, and for this blog post welcoming the site into the network!
• think:lab – whose author, Christian Long wrote a glowing review of my work. I previously wrote about his blog, and am happy to be a fellow member of the 9rules Education Community with him. I’m also adding his blog to my blogroll.

Christian Long of think:lab (a fellow 9rules member whose blog I’m appreciating more and more as I read it!) writes that Wikipedia will be the first element in the One Laptop per Child content repository. “A few minutes ago here at the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. They’ve been talking about this for at least a year, but now it’s official.” (Andy Carvin via BoingBoing) Christian comments that “One of the ways to create equality is not just offering self-powered computing technology to developing nations, but also to allow each voice to quickly become an equal when it comes to creating, evaluating, and using universal information.” The inclusion of Wikipedia creates a symbiotic relationship where both tools represent open access, community knowledge access and construction, and both tools strengthen each other’s existence.

At the conference, the Wikimedia Foundation also announced Wikiversity and Wikiwyg. According to Wikimedia, Wikiversity will be “a center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.” More detail about Wikiversity can be found in the Wikiversity/Modified project proposal. This looks very promising, and I’ll be writing in greater depth about it.

Wikia and SocialText will launch Wikiwyg, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor for wiki sites. Here’s what Ross Mayfield (Socialtext CEO) said about Wikiwyg on his blog. Andy Carvin said of Wikiwyg: “It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing. The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. ‘Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet,’ because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.”

9rules Network just released the list of blogs accepted from Submission Round 4 held on May 17th. Using Wiki in Education is one of 111 blogs accepted out of 700 submissions. I’m very proud of this, and honored that the blog will have wider exposure as part of the network. Look for more posts next week, including new interviews, information on new products, and I’ll be blogging from the NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland, OH.