PBwiki is, indeed, yummy

Thing 17 was a fun one. I've heard a lot about PBwiki but, once again, hadn't taken the time to test it myself. Thing 17 made me do it!

The big plusses:

1. It's free! Gosh, I love the information age!
2. It's easy-peasy! I added content to a page, added this blog to a list of blogs, and then created a whole new page! I seriously doubt that many people would be intimidated by editing a page if they have basic computer skills.

One complaint: It seemed to me that the table of contents should have automatically updated to include my new page, but I manually added it. I'm sure there must be some way to make it go automatically; my characteristic impatience for reading help messages prevented me from finding it. I may discover it now that I have created a private PBwiki for myself, just to play with this whole wiki thing more. (You can't get to this link; I put it here for my own convenience. I doubt you would want to diddle around in the chaos of my mind any more than you do in reading this blog, anyway, but if you really want to, ask me and perhaps I will let you. Then again, perhaps not.)

Another note of caution: It would be good to suggest a standard format for the pages. Some of them were too chaotic to read. Too many cooks in the kitchen with no head chef.

We use SharePoint wikis at work; I have contributed content but not set one up independently. They seem to be more automatic than PBwiki in some ways, but also less user friendly in others. This is definitely going to require more investigation on my part, both in PBwiki and SharePoint.

I'm not going to wax philosophic about wikis any more as my last blog entry about wikis is about 3 miles long.

Later note: After playing with my new wiki a bit, I realized that the Learning 2.0 wiki must be built in an earlier version of the software. The current version operates more like I thought it should. It still doesn't automatically generate a table of contents, but it does automatically create a page when you add a link to the table of contents. This is much like SharePoint. It works, but I wish it worked in reverse, too. Maybe in the next rev?


Technorati tags: learning 2.0, 23 things, PBwiki