Design Tool: PBWiki

This is a review of PBWiki, a web-based wiki tool provided by PBWorks. If you are unfamiliar with wikis, you essentially have a basic website, blogging, and collaboration space rolled into one. Wikipedia is probably the most well known wiki. What started out as a place to share a document and simultaneously edit the document online with other people who are using other computers, has now become a tool to share files, organize and present content, and communicate and collaborate. Both educators and businesspeople have taken to wiki providers, like PBWorks, to share and collaborate online.

Obviously this type of service can be found in many different forms. LMS’s are becoming more and more like wikis (and then provide a lot more, like quizzes and gradebooks). However, if you are looking for something like an LMS but more basic, PBWiki is a great choice. This could be used by instructional designers needing a simple space to share and collaborate on files, organize content into folders, and hold threaded discussions. I see its main use as being a basic way to deliver educational content for a project.

How to get it

You can access PBWiki for free, though more space and features are provided if you upgrade to various paid accounts. Here are the package options for educators:

Basic Edition (Free)	Classroom Edition ($99 per year)	Campus Edition ($799 per year)
Allow up to 100 accounts to your space (or you can make it public and anyone can access)	100 controlled accounts	1000 controlled accounts
Control what kind of access users have: ·       Editors (can create and delete) ·       Writers (can create) ·       Viewers (can look at pages)	Greater security (you can allow only certain users to access certain files or folders)	Same features as Classroom Edition
2 GB of online storage space	40 GB of online storage space	Unlimited online storage space
Basic customization (can change space colors)	More customization (get the school logo on the page)	Campus dashboard to maintain multiple workspaces and users
		Premium support

If I wanted this kind of system for my school, I’d probably go with something like Canvas, which has a lot more features, like quizzes and gradebook. But for something simple and accessible, PBWiki is a great option.

How it's used

Here is an example of what PBWiki looks like:

This is the home page of a course workspace I created. You can edit this page, create new pages, organize those pages by folders. You can create easy navigation in a box to the right to other pages. You can link within pages. This is what makes PBWiki much like a basic website. It allows you to deliver and share content. As a free user, I can’t restrict things on the page level (like keep students from editing my pages, but I haven’t had any try).

Here’s an example of the edit page. It provides a basic content editor. This also allows you to insert tables, links to websites, and links to other wiki pages and files in your workspace. You can also switch to an html editor, which allows you to do some more customization. If you have a Flickr account, you can upload files there, write in the html code for an image, and include the image in your page (Sorry, no easy upload photo tool). You can upload videos from sites like YouTube, as well as audio files (there is an upload tool for these).

One of my favorite features about PBWiki is the discussion board feature (pictured above). This feature is right below the main page. There is a comment box to begin a discussion. Discussions are threaded (at a basic level—you can’t really do threads within threads within threads). Comments are date- and user-stamped. You can clear comments later. It just provides a great way to discuss the content of pages, which is useful when working asynchronously.

This last image is of the space where you can upload files, create new pages, and organize content within folders. The nice thing about PBWiki is that the history of your pages are saved, and you can revert back to previous versions at any time. If you ever need help learning the features, PBWorks provides a great support system—though, really, this is quite intuitive to use.

Conclusion

Once again, PBWiki is great if you want an easy way to deliver content; share and manage users, files and pages; and collaborate through writing and discussion. Canvas does provide these types of features and more, but a free account on Canvas only gives you 250 MB of storage space. The greatest downside to Canvas is that the content of Canvas is not searchable. If you are using Canvas as a major content delivery system for instruction, you need an easy way for users to find material. You don’t want them to get frustrated trying to hunt for a page they need. PBWiki not only presents pages and files effectively and in one place, but everything in the workspace is searchable. It searches pages as well as discussion threads. The content within uploaded files are not searchable, but the titles will be picked up by the search. This is huge! The downside to PBWiki that it is not easy to link it to an LMS (meaning, it doesn’t have great LTI capabilities). You can export your content into a zipped text file, but I still need to explore how you can link up or export this resource for use in other systems.

Anyways, to sum up, if you are looking for an easy-to-use, free collaboration space or a content-delivery system, PBWiki has some great features. 

Here’s the url for this nifty source: http://pbworks.com