Wikispaces

As a student, I've tried a lot of different online platforms to facilitate collaborative work, including Google documents, Facebook groups, Doodle polls, Officezilla, msn chats, and Skype calls. Online collaboration has never worked as well as meeting in real life. It's hard to negotiate ideas and get everyone to participate.

This was also true on wikispaces, when we tried to pull together our alternative campus tour through page edits and a discussion board. A lot of ideas had been posted, but there wasn't any direction on how we were actually going to work on the project. Eventually, we had to meet offline.

But I think that wikispaces is very useful in sharing and organizing information. The class wiki worked really well as a central location to collect ideas, resources, discussions, etc. The wiki format has a kind of democracy that's absent from other collaboration software (ie institutionalized Courselink)- the ability to edit and participate in any page.