So I met with my women's lit students in a computer classroom today: wanted to get them going with the wiki, which we'll start working with on a more committed basis next week. Since I had them all there, I said, hey, go ahead and edit that first page. Add your blog URL to it.
Yeah. Bad idea. The wiki wasn't prepared to process so many edits at once: it couldn't keep up. Plus, different people were editing different versions of the homepage, depending on when they happened to click "edit." So if they were editing an older version of the page but were the last to finish editing, then the older version appeared when they were finished. All the new edits (except the last person's) were gone to the history file.
Not that any of this is terribly interesting, unless you too are starting to use a wiki and had the bright idea to get your whole class to edit one page at the same time. And not that it was a terrible moment, except that I had to tell them to stop, stop please, and do it later. We moved on to the discussion board (which is pretty primitive, I have to say), which is able to take many users at once.
And now that I've written it down, perhaps I'll remember it the next time I use a wiki.
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1 comment:
Oh, gosh. Thanks for posting.
My class didn't go as well as I wanted it today. There just wasn't enough time to do everything. Plus, at the end, I started losing my voice. I guess that is a huge sign that I was doing too much talking!!
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