A Guide on How to do Discussions on Wikispaces

Introduction

If you haven’t yet heard of Wikispaces, it’s a great place to collaborate with group members for a project, or even teach a class something new. Like its other ‘wiki’ counterparts, Wikispaces allows for you to create and edit pages on the site, as well as granting access and administrative duties to someone else or to the entire group or team.

The best way to do this, is to start a discussion page for whatever topic you plan on building. In this article, learn how to do discussions on Wikispaces, how to create, edit, and add a variety of different items to help make your space your very own.

What is Wikispaces?

As mentioned above, Wikispaces is a free place for businesses, individuals, groups, and educators to create and edit pages. Think of Wikispaces like Wikipedia; one person creates the wikispace, and if another person finds that there needs to be an edit, as long as they have an account, they are able to log in and make the necessary changes.

What Are Discussions?

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Discussions are comments or disagreements that a person might have in regards to the article. For Wikispaces, depending on what you have your page for - let’s say an education class - the teacher might set up pages for different subjects or may have groups set up their own pages for an assignment or project. The same is true for say a work project between co-workers; the group leader might set up a page so that those members are able to view it.

When a main page has been set up, there is an area in which people can discuss the topic. For instance, for the class project, the main page might be the summary of the project and the goals that need to be met in order for the group to receive credit. In the discussion area, the students in the group might discuss ways on achieving these goals, by stating their point of view or discussing someone else’s. This is particularly effective if say, the group members are not in the same city or the same state; this can also be true if a business worker needs to go out of town or if all of the employees work elsewhere.

How To Do Discussions on WIkispaces

In order to make a discussion page on a Wikispace, you will first need to create a wiki.

• Go to Wikispaces’ main page and sign up either for an organization wikispace (this is the paid version) or an individual/small group wikispace (this is the free version). When you sign up, you’ll be able to name your space or you can wait until you’re actually on the wiki page.
• Once you receive the confirmation in your email, you can now start your wikispace. Your wiki page will be created and all you need to do is start! There is an ’edit this page’ button in the upper left corner in which you can click in order to start editing. Begin with a summary of what you plan on discussing or what the page is for. In this part, you can also change the text, add links, and pictures.
• When you have added what you want, you can go to the ‘discussion’ tab, which is the second tab at the top of the page. Here, you (or anyone else) can add, create, and delete discussion topics. If you are the administrator of the wiki, you can go to the settings page and designate who else you would like to be able to edit the wikispace. This means they can also edit discussions.
• Discussions are threaded, which means that when someone replies to that topic, it will show up as a response to that particular topic and not, say, the entire discussion page. If there are a lot of discussion topics, you or anyone else will be able to view and respond to them.

Knowing how to do discussions on Wikispaces is a nice way of getting people’s feedback on a particular subject or will allow for group members or students to discuss a particular topic, such as the project or homework assignments through the discussion page and depending on who the administrator of the page is, sometimes members will also be able to edit and create more discussion topics.

References

Wikispaces - www.wikispaces.com

Image credit courtesy of wikispaces.