Wikis go corporate
I just finished listening to Joe Kraus’s presentation at the Web 2.0 conference via the IT Conversations podcast. Joe’s new company, JotSpot, is taking wiki technology corporate by adding the ability to create web applications within the wiki environment. Listen to this clip from his talk where he describes what this new “application wiki” is all about.
Wiki purists will not like this. If you compare JotSpot with the original wiki, the differences are stark. The spirit of wiki is simplicity itself, but since I’m not a wiki purist I feel free to say that JotSpot looks really cool. We’re looking at various intranet solutions at work right now, and it’s going to be important to find the right balance between power and simplicity for our employees. I love the simplicity of a more traditional wiki engine like MediaWiki (which is really not all that traditional), but I know that we would feel constrained if we attempted to use it for our entire intranet. Plone has all kinds of bells and whistles, but building everything we would need would be no small task. Maybe JotSpot will hit the happy medium.
JotSpot doesn’t seem quite right for student work, although I haven’t seen the innards yet. I think the more organic, less flashy interface of a traditional wiki more properly focuses students on content and building knowledge collaboratively.
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Tim:
Sure is funny/interesting/telling to read “traditional” applied to “Wiki” =)
Hi Tim, thanks for your interest and post about JotSpot. You bring up some very interesting points about the relationship between “traditional wikis”, Plone, and “application wikis.” If you’re interested in chatting about application wikis or getting more information about the JotSpot wiki, drop me a line.
-Scott McMullan
scott at jot.com
I too, just listend to Joe’s presentation and immediately thought that it might be a solution for instructors trying to create an online learning environment where students are working collaboratively. Why do you think student’s would need a “less flashy” interface? I haven’t seen this at work, so maybe I’m off. Interesting thoughts though. Lee
Lee, JotSpot may be just the thing for students. As I said in the post, I haven’t really had a good look at it yet. My experience has been that students too easily go for flash instead of quality content. Have you seen those PowerPoint presentations where students use every single sound effect and transition? Yikes!
We’re really getting into Moodle (http://moodle.org/) in my district and use its wiki functionality when it’s needed. I don’t doubt for a moment that a wiki could be used as an online learning environment, but our teachers are finding that there are a lot of features in Moodle that would take a fair bit of work to duplicate in a wiki.