Friday, September 23, 2005

Invited users to the class wiki

After some time spent working to create user accounts for my class wiki, I finally sent out emails to everyone in my ILS501 class inviting them to participate. I also sent out a separate email to everyone giving them their specific username and password to edit the wiki. I chose to go with a site that only registered users could edit to help protect content . Of course, the trade off is that more usernames and passwords can be cumbersome - and it is much more work for me to maintain. However, I like the site I chose to host my wiki. I find it easy to use and fairly intuitive. The true test will be to find out the opinions of class mates once they have tried it.

I'm hoping to use the wiki as a collaborative tool for students in the class to use to publish results of the web search exercise. My plan is to create individual pages for each search engine that someone evaluates. Hopefully, my collegeaues will be willing to post their summations of each search engine evaulated. I thought it would be interesting to do a compilation of everyone's results to see what types of trends and opinions the class has developed about search engines. Additionally, I would like to get student opinions of the wiki to find out what they might have liked/not liked/found easy to use/found difficult to use.

As I run across different wikis of interest or web sites dedicated to web search engines, I am trying to post the links to the wiki. I'm going with the theory that students may be more apt to use the wiki if they can find information of interest to them.

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