Jul 31, 2004
Your Classroom Wiki
One cool thing that you could easily do with a Instiki wiki is use it to run a wiki in your classroom, off the teacher's desktop or laptop (can you run Ruby on a Pocket PC? It'll work off your phone in a few years...). Anyhow, without bothering your school or district sys admin. Of course, you can do this with any open source wiki or weblog, but Instiki is an unusually simple and (so far) well behaved server.
All you'd need to do is launch Instiki at the beginning of class and perhaps note the IP address of your computer to allow your students to access the wiki in the classroom. If Instiki's server supported Rendezvous (soon to be known as OpenTalk) it would be even easier, if everyone is using a Mac, because then "Mr. Hoffman's Wiki" would just show up automatically on the student's Rendezvous bookmarks in Safari. Even without Rendezvous trickery, this would be a very good way to experiment.
I also noticed that Instiki supports locking in editing, that is, if one person is editing the page, it warns you if someone is editing it at the same time, which would lead to someone losing their changes, at least temporarily. So that's a pretty important feature, and I'm not sure how many of the dozens of wiki's floating around actually support it. If you're thinking of using a wiki at school you should look for one that does locking.
