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class notetaking rant

So… if you’re given a wiki to take notes into to share with your classmates, and you’re typing notes, why would you not type notes into the wiki? Lots of typing and at least some visible notetaking last week, but nothing in the wiki. So… I’m back to being the class notetaker. Mumble. Yay for sharing! Grumble. (And I’m a lousy notetaker… the rest of the class deserves better.)

(Admittedly the text editor for twiki is pretty bad, but… urgh. It isn’t that hard.)

(And admittedly this would all be way better if we had actual collaborative editing, instead of having to ‘assign’ it to someone every week. But still….)

Comments closed — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Thursday, February 14, 2008, at 11:32 pm by Luis. Filed in forfacebook, school.

8 Comments

  1. Martijn

    Have you tried the ‘obby’ programs (gobby/sobby/etc)?

    It’s a great collaborative editing system.

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 1:40 am | Permalink
  2. Luis

    Martijn: I have, but it has (relative to webapps) a high barrier to entry and to publication post-class. Still nice, though.

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 7:16 am | Permalink
  3. Martin Sevior

    We hear you Luis and will soon have a solution based on abicollab

    Stay tuned, it should be ready within a month.

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 7:30 am | Permalink
  4. dcraven

    Hi Luis,
    It doesn’t really solve the problem you speak of, but you might find a FF extension like It’s All Text[1] to be of some use for easing some of the pain of featureless web forms like the TWiki editor. I’m sure you probably use something like this already, but thought it was worth mentioning :). Cheers.

    [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 8:09 am | Permalink
  5. Luis

    Martin: eeeeenteresting.
    dcraven: The problem in this particular case is twiki’s really bizarro markup; I’ll look at It’s All Text but unless it has twiki-specific markup support it won’t really help the core problem.

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 9:22 am | Permalink
  6. dcraven

    I see. I misunderstood the problem as an issue with non-rich text boxes in general. The addon I mentioned simply lets you use an external editor more easily. In turn, the chosen editor can support TWiki syntax in the form of appropriate highlighting. It helps a bit, but is not a solution. Cheers.

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 10:01 am | Permalink
  7. rmg

    I may have missed some previous reason against using it.. but google docs support collaborative editing..

    Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 11:57 am | Permalink
  8. Joe Smith

    Brutal. Classes that don’t actually work together are lame. Maybe the above suggestion about Google Docs might work?

    Posted on 16-Feb-08 at 1:17 pm | Permalink

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Random thoughts and serendipity » Notes collation … again on 15-Feb-08 at 1:19 am

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] This is what I took a stab at during my talk(?) at GNUnify2008. And was ever so surprised to find that the students use a combination of IM and Google Docs to swap notes. [...]

  2. Red Hat | The Open Source Leader on 15-Feb-08 at 3:19 pm

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] This is what I took a stab at during my talk(?) at GNUnify2008. And was ever so surprised to find that the students use a combination of IM and Google Docs to swap notes. [...]