Interesting thread indeed! I agree many educators are put off by having to learn syntax. I guess that besides user-friendliness some reasons might be:
1. Time to train their students may affect time to teach the syllabus. Whether we dis/like such approach, the fact is the teaching job throughout the world is frequently associated to "finishing the syllabus" at an institutional level, & failing to do so may lead to sanctions (particularly where extracurricular factors are concerned). 2. Students can be keen OR NOT on spending their free time on acquiring tech skills which, depending on the educational system, may be hardly incorporated into assessment procedures (=if I don't need it to pass, forget about it). 3. In countries where edu centres don't have ICT professionals, teachers have to undertake such role involving significant unpaid overtime. 4. Despite the huge advantage of introducing WYSIWYG (THANKS!!! I normally forget syntax & accessibility is a real issue for me), other platforms such as pbwiki can be perceived as far more "practical" . I realise these may not share OER Foundation/WE/Wikimedia philosophy but we can't expect every teacher to prioritise long-term global goals over immediate classroom needs. Cheers, Alex P. Real De: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] En nombre de john stampe Enviado el: domingo, 22 de noviembre de 2009 5:03 Para: [email protected] Asunto: [WikiEducator] Re: Collaborative Document sharing Sorry, I did not quite understand what you where asking. And I will agree with Wayne in his response to you. But I have a question. And this is addressed not just to you, but to everyone. Why is it that educators -- the people whose job it is to teach students about new technology and concepts -- do not want to learn the technology themselves? I am not taking a position on use, or ease of use, of technology, I am just curious why this attitude exists. Thoughts? Cheers, John http://www.wikieducator.org/User:JohnWS http://johnsearth.blogspot.com _____ From: 2web3 <[email protected]> To: WikiEducator <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, November 21, 2009 4:58:35 PM Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: Collaborative Document sharing Thanks for the explanation. I understand all the concepts that you just outlined, but this is not what I asked. Let me try to explain the problem again. The target audience of this site are educators. Why educators are using it? Because wiki makes collaboration and sharing of the content easy, unlike MS Word. But I still consider that they need to be quite computer literate to be able to use a wiki site. How many educators are NOT using wikis because they need to learn and use a cryptic "wiki" language? I think they fall back to the trusted tool, such as MS Word and live in the world of pain by collaborating via e-mail. Why they use MS Word and Notepad? Because educational content rarely is just bland text. And boy they need to print it. And they don't care why wiki cannot be easily print, web/HTML/CSS or not. In MS Word it's easy, what you see on screen is exactly what gets printed. This problem is solved long time ago. Am I the only one who sees the world this way and everybody else is just happy the way things are? Educators, what about the colleagues that don't use WE? Am I right or not? On Nov 20, 11:47 pm, john stampe <[email protected]> wrote: > I am not sure exactly what your question is, but I will attempt a reply anyway. > > First, I think you are confused a little with some concepts. > > A text editor is for typing text. It does not directly give you formatting. The resulting product is simply a text file. MS Word or OpenOffice on the other hand is a word processor, it can add formatting, tables, etc. The problem with sharing them is actually in the format used, usually each program has their own format. OpenOffice has helped by using the standardized XML format. > > Wiki's and other structured text systems such as LaTeX are another different thing. Word processor files contain all the formatting hard coded into them, like a binary file. However, for structured text (wikis) the files are actually text files with the formatting indictated, like computer code. The underlying wiki software then turns that code into what you see in your browser (it slightly more complicated, but I won't go into detail). > > Yes, wikis are not WYSIWYG, but they are simply text formats, not locked in formats. But there is being developed WYSIWYG editor for wikis right here on WE, it is being tested on our test site. > > If you understand wiki syntax, then you can actually work on stuff offline. It is what I normally do as I do not have a permanent internet connection. I write my stuff offline in a text editor using wiki syntax and then paste it on to the web when I am connected. Again this is because the wiki page is simply a text file. (See here for my guidehttp://www.wikieducator.org/Help:Editing_using_a_text_editor) > > I am not sure what you mean by rich formatting. Most of the formatting problem I think you are refering to is a limitation on html not in the wiki. And as most professional designers will tell you what looks good on a screen is not what looks good when printed and vice versa. (As the scribus websitehttp://www.scribus.netsays "Graphics used on a website are almost always unusable for commercial printing".) > > Hope this helps. > John > > http://www.wikieducator.org/User:JohnWShttp://johnsearth.blogspot.com <http://www.wikieducator.org/User:JohnWShttp:/johnsearth.blogspot.com> > > ________________________________ > From: 2web3 <[email protected]> > To: WikiEducator <[email protected]> > Sent: Sat, November 21, 2009 1:36:16 PM > Subject: [WikiEducator] Collaborative Document sharing > > I have a somewhat generic question related to editors in general. I > feel this discomfort with current state of document creation. Let me > explain. > > In the beginning there were just simple text editors. Then they got > more sophisticated, visual, WYSIWYG, culminating with products such as > MS Word and alike. This is all great, but the document is stored in > individual files (silos) and is hard to share and collaborate with a > team. Of course, you can send via e-mail, but then the proliferation > of versions and comments makes this kind of collaboration difficult. > > Then came centralized systems such as SharePoint that allow to store > the documents in one place, lock the document so that only one person > can edit it. However this again is far from perfect: I cannot easily > track the history, who did what, what has really changed. And I still > cannot properly comment on the document. But is better than e-mail. > > Then wikis came along. They made a whole bunch of stuff easy > (versioning with diff, easy access to information, search, permissions > etc). But they lack several important features a modern editor has: > * They are not truly WYSIWYG. Any wiki is light-years behind Word > from editing capabilities. This is a major impediment why wikis are > not widely used in our organization. > * They are not easy to work with in offline mode (when traveling on > a plane) > * They generally rapidly degrade in performance as more users use a > wiki installation > * It is not easy to just send a wiki "document" to somebody, > especially to an external partner, when the wiki is on intranet. It > has to be opened to external users, security policies need to be put > in place etc. E-Mail is just light years easier in this respect. > * Wikis, being web application, poorly support rich formatting that > we've come to expect from a Word doc. I cannot easily take a wiki > "document", print to PDF and send it to external partner - usually the > document will not look professional. And to make it look professional > in wiki will take way more time and resources than just to write it > from scratch in Word. > > So here's my dilemma... Can anybody help me point out to a solution? > Or if you experience the same issue - share your feelings as well, let > me know that I'm not suffering alone. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
