Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Widget of the week

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Peter,

Some time ago I tested a Firefox extension called Jybe (http://www.jybe.com/) which allows you to share your browsing with others. I think I tested it on windows and Mac OSX and it worked quite nicely. It's free as well.

I assume you could use this extension for people to collaborate on a LAMS Journal entry or forum.

Also, it seems that Negroponte's laptop will run on Linux. However, it doesn't say (http://laptop.media.mit.edu) whether it will use a graphical interface or not. Additionally, it seems that it will have external ports so you can hook them up to a network. Hopefully that will be the case. At any case Kudos to MIT's media lab.

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Peter Miller

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Thanks, Ernie. Nice thing about JotLive is that it's zero install and runs on IE which is still the University's preferred browser. Of course, it'd be nice to see something similar native to LAMS one day.

Anyway, my nomination for WoW this week is tiddlywiki from http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ even if I haven't used it in anger yet. As it's name suggests, it's a wiki but it's main claim to fame is that it doesn't need a server: the magic is in the Javascript on the page you're editing. I imagine it might be given to students to accompany a course, maybe containing a glossary and some lecture outlines. The nice thing for the students, of course, is that they could annotate and extend the content as the course progressed.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Peter,

I forgot to mention, Jybe (http://www.jybe.com/) also works for IE as well as for Firefox.

About Wiki, James has been pushing for a Wiki tool in LAMS for a while.... and I've been trying to postpone it . But yeah, we'll get to that at one point.

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Peter,

I added an empty Wiki page from Tiddlywiki into LAMS Share Resources and it worked quite well. See pictures attached

This could potentially be quite interesting for teachers
that one their student to write down their thoughts while crusing along a sequence. Then the teacher can ask the student (say as the last activity in the sequence) to upload his wiki file. Although nice, this has the drawback that you can't really group a bunch of students and get them to collaborate on an online wiki.

Nevertheless, if you already have a Wiki server happening you can use the Share resources or HTML Noticeboard (in LAMS 1.0.2) to point to the Wiki page you want your students to collaborate.

Let me think about this one as it might not be too hard to create a wiki like page with a few resources. If you have more thoughts, please let me know.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Peter Miller

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You're right -- the single-user aspect isn't really very wiki-ish at all. To be fair, I think the author has positioned it as a microcontent authoring tool with some scope for blogging -- the interface is very cool though. Not sure of a decent use case except maybe serial authorship where students take it in turns to add/edit. Nice to know it works though.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: Peter Miller

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Another possible use in LAMS would be to provide a version of the student notebook for offline use and further annotation. I'm not suggesting that it should be possible to synch the two but, hey, that would be nice too.

Posted by Peter Miller