Strategies for handling simultaneous edits
Here’s part of an email I received recently:
I’m trying to find a way to work with a wiki with my students. We’re trying to do some collaborative writing type activities. I want them to work in real time in the same document so a wiki seemed perfect. However, because we don’t allow email access I need them to do it without registering as a user of the wiki (the only way I know would require an email address to register). I tried it with several different types of wikis, but every time some peoples’ work was lost. It seemed like when someone saved what they had entered, it deleted what someone else had typed. I thought working in a table might help since they would have a specific place to type and not actually be entering in the same space, but that didn’t show any real improvement. Unfortunately, we don’t have Moodle at this time – maybe next year – since that would probably eliminate our registration problems.
My strategy has alway been to divide up the wiki editing into smaller chunks of content on multiple wiki pages to reduce the chances of editing collisions. It’s far from a perfect solution. Google Docs would work, but the lack of student email accounts would prevent that.
Is there a better solution out there? Is there a wiki engine that support simultaneous edits gracefully? I’m all ears.
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MediaWiki handles concurrency issues very gracefully. If two ppl work on the same text the second person to save will get a merge UI where s/he can choose where and how to insert the new version.
can be found at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
I introduced this wiki at my company for internal documentation as well as other important musings…
G
Back when JotSpot Live was around, the interface divided a document into sections and only one person at a time could work on a section. Now that Google has acquired JotSpot, I’m not sure what the differences are going to be, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping an eye on.
http://www.jot.com/
As far as the email issue goes, you might try Google Apps for Education. You have access to their email account with your own domain. You really don’t even have to let them access it. You can then let them use Docs and Spreadsheets and collaborate there. I have really like what Docs can do in terms of simultaneous edits. Works slick. Check out Google Apps for Education at: http://www.google.com/a/edu/
I’ve always been a big fan of SubEthaEdit which is designed for simultaneous editing of text documents. If you have Macs and can easily install new apps, then this works wonderfully.
The free for non-commercial use version is here:
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/old.html
I use wikispaces for this. If you email them with usernames and passwords, they will create accounts for students that don’t have an email. Best of all, its free for teachers and contains no ads.
PBWiki’s free version will let you have a wiki that doesn’t require an email address. The teacher can set up the wiki with his/her email address and then give the students the password. The password is all that’s needed to edit the pages. Unfortunately, like most wiki, live multiple editing can’t happen, but our teachers have done like you suggested – break up the edits over several pages off of the main. You can pay for PBWiki and get more control over student access and have it with levels of passwords, but for what it sounds like they want to do, the free version should be plenty!
http://pbwiki.com
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