It’s been a big week for our wiki pilot here at UNSW with a visit from Adam Frey from Wikispaces and also the release of a number of new useful upgrade features. Here at UNSW we met with Adam to discuss options and requirements for the implementation of wSSO.
A small but select number of wikispaces users from around Sydney gathered on Wednesday morning at the Ultimo College of TAFE NSW for an informal chat with Adam re current uses and developments. Here are a few notes (thanks Mike) and links:
- Wikispaces now has around 3m users; about 1/3rd of business is K-12; 1/3 is higher ed; 1/3rd business, government and non-profits. In the corporate sector companies such as IBM and Xerox. However they focus primarily on education.
- Adam stressed their desire to keep the platform simple and explained their approach to supporting organisations on a case by case basis
- Some recent developments have included improved tagging to manage content and work with larger groups, and work on integration – Moodle, AD, LDAP – how wikispaces can tie into existing authentication systems
- Current priorities and focus include 1) Making the current features more effective and streamlined, 2) The administration of private label sites – need to develop private level sites for use by large organisations in which can be managed and maintained by one or two people, and 3) Introducing functionality that they just don’t have.
- There was some discussion around the need for page level permissions for group of members. As well as API discussions, Adam raised the concept of clusters of inter-linked wikis (parent-child)
- Adam raised the prospect of an Australian wikispaces users network to share resources amongst themselves.
- The Moodle-Wikispaces extension now exists but hasn’t been announced because it’s being evaluated and tested. If you have private level site, you need to ensure your usernames match up with what is in the Moodle system.
- LCMS integration is now possible via widget
- I asked about math and music notation. Adam mentioned LATEX and the ability to use some code/Math tag but stressed that they would not be developing toolbar components.
Sites discussed
- http://ictcentre.wikispaces.net
- http://bridge.wikispaces.net
- http://bosco-uganda.wikispaces.net
- http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com
- http://telt.unsw.wikispaces.net
Other recent improvements include the ability to:
- resize your widgets
- include referencing/citations
- more easily open links in a new window
- create and link to anchors
- view recent changes via a clean easy to read interface
- tag file uploads with a much more usable search interface
- publish and print pages or wikis as a PDF
Image may be NSFW.
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[CC FlickR image: thomcochrane]
