Quantum Forest logs are written by Luis A. Apiolaza in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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Next year I have to prepare thirty two lectures; eight for an introductory class and twenty four for a 400 level elective class. The first will be the only exposure to tree breeding for many people, so I need to prepare a sort of ‘tree breeding survival kit’. The elective class will be taken by Bachellor and Masters (with extra course work) students, so there is much more room to explore topics.
One of the issues when preparing teaching material (and presentations) is what is the right level to pitch it. Kathy Sierra—from Creating Passionate Users—has a very interesting article entitled Reference vs. learning: pick ONE. There she explains that the author has to decide if he is writing a reference book or a learning one. There is no chance of doing both in a single volume, so one has to choose from the beginning to use the appropriate structure and language.
After deciding between reference and learning, the following question is how to write the notes? If I am writing short documents I normally use a word processor (even MSWord will do). However, when I work in large projects—particularly with lots of mathematics—I try to use something like LATEX. If there are no maths I may use a Wiki like PmWiki. This choice does not matter at all when working solo, but what happens when I try to collaborate with other authors (a pretty common situation)? We keep sending MSWord files back and forth, but there is always a lag, because there is no way of simultaneously work in documents and proper versioning in Word. Or we… well, there is no alternative because my collaborators are no LATEX or Wiki savvy.
While looking at Kathy’s article I followed a link to Jesse James Garret’s site, which in turn pointed to O’Reilly Radar, which linked to Writely’s site. Writely and Writeboard are two examples1 of ‘web-based collaborative writing tools’. Both tools play with the same concept: let’s adapt the Wiki idea and have text documents in a web server, which can be edited by several people using some sort of markup simpler than HTML. Many wikis already have versioning systems embedded. Throw permissions on top of the mix, a simple interface, a bunch of buzzwords (say AJAX and Web 2.0) and we have the new ‘web-based collaborative writing tools’.
I have tried both systems and I feel much more comfortable with Writely. Why? Writeboard requires using the Textile markup for formatting the document. I love Textile—I am using it for writing this log entry—but my colleagues are unfamiliar with it. However, they know how to use the icons in Writely, because they use similar icons in MSWord. In addition, I can not keep a list of documents in Writeboard unless I get an account in Backpack, which is an extra hassle. Finally, it is possible to import MSWord files into Writely, which is a bonus.
I will write the notes for the first eight lectures in Writely and see if I can get some friends to make comments and modify the notes. My own little experiment, if you want.
1 I also came across Zoho Writer, but I have not had a chance to test it.
del.icio.us tags: teaching collaboration writing.
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