There are a number of online ways to collaborate and it can be confusing to figure out how they differ. This is a quick summary on the subject. Examples of each of these will appear on the Ed+Tech page shortly.
Blog: an online journal for a person or a small group. A blog consists of posts, organized chronologically. Many blogs permit commenting on the posts, which can become an extensive back-and-forth discussion among the post readers and author(s). A powerful feature of blogs is subscription: a user can subscribe to multiple blogs and then use a single interface, an aggregator, to read new postings from all his/her subscribed blogs, instead of having to visit each blog individually. Google Reader is one such aggregator. See Best of Web page for info on Google Reader.
Scenario 1: A teacher blogs to disseminate information to students, and (optionally) allow comments on the disseminated information.
Scenario 2: Blog as a record of class notes: a student is assigned to a lecture and is responsible for creating a blog entry with that lecture's notes.
Scenario 3: Students and teacher blog together, continuing the discussions started in class.
Wiki: a website with webpages that can be modified by the site’s visitors and are (typically) highly cross-referenced. Wiki is best when a group wants to collaborate but the details of the collaborative process and tracking of individual contributions are not important. Wiki can be used both for a generating a polished "final product", namely a website, or for free-form brainstorming.
Scenario 1: A class/group project to produce a multimedia website on a particular topic.
Scenario 2: A web space for informal brainstorming and research for a group project.
Forum: (typically) democratic discussions; any forum member can pose a question/topic, anyone can answer/comment. In a moderated forum, moderator(s) vet and approve/reject each entry. Successful forums usually have large membership covering many areas of expertise. Most school-related forums are private. Forums predate the Internet and are not as widely used today as the other technologies listed here. When they are used, it is by a large online community in order to share knowledge. An example is the forum at Classroom 2.0, which is a community of educators.
Real-time collaboration with Google Docs: multiple people working on the same document at (possibly) the same time. How is this different from a wiki? Wiki software may not handle simultaneous editing of a webpage smoothly; changes made by multiple Google Docs editors' are displayed "live". As with wiki, this is best when a group needs to collaboratively produce a final product, and the details of the collaborative process and tracking of individual contributions are not important.
Scenario 1: Geographically-dispersed group working on a paper and (possibly) editing at the same time.
Scenario 2: Producing a quick summary of a group discussion.
Each of the technologies mentioned can be setup to be either public or private to a group.
Next time ... which tools to use if you want to try these.
