Thursday, October 23, 2008
New experiences
I had the opportunity to use PBwiki for a group project. I found it to be a useful tool, but had one rather unpleasant experience...and learned a valuable lesson. My group was working on a PowerPoint presentation and saving it to the Wiki so that we could make changes and additions as we had the time. The night before the presentation was due, I opened up the presentation and made my additions/changes. When I was done I uploaded the presentation to the Wiki. Sounds good right....NOT! At 10:30 that evening I went back to make some changes to the slide transitions, when to my extreme mortification, I found that all of my work was gone. since I had not saved the changes anywhere else, I was up until 2:30am redoing all of the work. I later realized that another member of my group was working on the presentation at the same time and uploaded his changes after me. By default his changes over rode (not sure that's a real word) mine. That's one feature of Wiki I'd like to see changed!!! The lesson I learned, or rather had reinforced was, no matter what....save your work to multiple places!
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3 comments:
Man, whoever typed over your responses must be a real bonehead! He he he, just kidding, thought that I'd visit your blog real quick. I have to say, I like pbwiki right now a whole lot better than GoogleDocs. Guess I'm still getting used to it, though...
Later.
I am so sorry that you had that bad experience! I have made a note in the course comments that an instructor should be sure to show emphasize "Edit Lock" feature within PBwiki to avoid just that issue. I do like the feature in Google apps that visibly shows the number of people currently collaborating on a document.
EDIT LOCK PBwiki feature:
"The edit lock is a feature we have in place to prevent two people from editing the same wiki page at the same time. There is no way to turn it off. If you are editing a page, no one else will be able to unless one of these things happens:
* You save the page.
* You hit cancel and don't save your changes.
* You make no changes on the page for five minutes or more.
If you leave the page alone for more than 5 minutes, another user can "steal" editing privileges from you. This cancels your changes and they can make their own changes."
http://pbwikimanual.pbwiki.com/The+Editor#EditLock
Nice job with your group's presentation in spite of your challenges.
I like GoogleDocs for collaboratting on certain tasks at work, but I am kind of frustrated with it right now as well. I guess time and practice will make the uses along with their pos./neg. aspects apparent.
The knowledge of the edit lock feature on PBWiki would be helpful to future classes, although I can't guarantee that I wouldn't have been distracted and let the 5 minute time of inactivity elapse, with the same end result. I think the moral is to save in more than one location...
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