Congratulations and welcome to Week 5 of the Web Quest. You are over half way there!

This week you will be exploring the unchartered waters of a Wiki by using the PBWorks service and can find out how useful they are for group work and collaborative editing.  

What is a Wiki?

A hosted service that allows you to create a webpage for free with shared online editing for group working. This means that anyone you have given permission to can access the site and add/edit/save the wiki. You can also track the changes made by others. Wikis make excellent Intranet subsitutes, are a useful asset for project management or creating a report with multiple authors and for adding extra information through hyperlinked pages. Providers include PBworks and Wetpaint. The name originates from the Hawaiian for 'quick'. The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia.

 www.pbworks.com - previously called PBWiki.

History: Started 2005, now worlds largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis.  

Example of: social networking, user generated content, collaborative editing, tagging, hyperlinking.

Number of Users: May 2008 - 500,000 registered wikis

Why Use: free packages, no advertising, WYSIWYG editing, easy to set up, privacy settings, use instead of an Intranet

Good For: professional looking, no HTML needed, instant publishing, project management, simple editing tools, chat/video widgets

Bad For: pay for upgrades, limited free security settings, limited free upload space.

Getting Started:

Setting up a PBwiki account 

Editing a Page

Adding a Picture

Sharing your wiki

Don't forget to: 

- Note your username and password if you set up a Pbwiki account.

- Record what you achieved this week on your blog and tag your post as 'Web Quest'.

If you get stuck reply to the Quest Post to get help from other participants

Enjoy Yourself!