Wikispaces Projects: no classroom needed in theory, so why is one needed in practice?
Good to see that Wikispaces is adding more support for collaborative work to their offerings. These kinds of tools are really useful for people who want to organise their own learning.
There’s just one fly in the ointment: people who want to organise their own learning can’t use them. That’s because Wikispaces is only making them available on wikis that are registered to educational institutions or for formal education.
What madness it would be if this support were held back from not-for-profit educational initiatives. I’ve asked Wikispaces if there’s any way round this.
[Update, 12 September: I possibly need to calm myself down after ranting about ‘madness’, since Wikispaces were pretty helpful in allowing me to make http://selforganisedlearning.wikispaces.com/ an education wiki, and thus get to use Projects. I had to certify that the wiki would be used exclusively for (capital H, capital E) Higher Education, but I didn’t have to provide signatures of the Dean and Registrar…]
Projects: A better way to work in classroom groups
We’re calling this new feature Projects. Whenever you have a particular assignment or activity, you can create a project for it, then define teams of members, each with its own unique pages, files, and permissions. Team content (that is, pages and files) are grouped together, separate from the main area of the wiki. That way, students in teams can do their group work completely independently from other teams.
As of today, projects are available on all Education-plan wikis (both K-12 and higher education), Plus- and Super-plan wikis that are categorized as Education, and all education Private Label sites. Projects have been built specifically for classroom work, so we are rolling them out to our education customers only. If you’re curious about how Projects work, check out our project help documentation — or keep reading.
Agile Learning 