I’ve a colleague who has suggested starting an online writing group with some other colleagues spread around the United States. It’s my job to come up with the platform for such a group. The online space would need to be private, capable of hosting files, and editable by the participants. My first thought was that I’d set up a Moodle for the group, giving every user teacher level access so that every member of the group could create and edit content.
How would you set up an online writing group for folks who want to share works in progress in order to get constructive feedback and support? While this, right now, is just for a few teachers, it might blossom into a student project — so any software solution would need to be scalable.
How Would You Set Up an Online Writing Group?
December 19th, 2006 · 7 Comments
Tags: Writing
7 responses so far ↓
Scott S. Floyd // Dec 19th 2006 at 10:20 am
Could you not do that with Google Docs? Keep them private and invite on the participants you want to each document. Comments could be added in different colors.
What about a locally hosted wiki? Could you lock it down for the privacy you are after?
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Aaron Smith // Dec 19th 2006 at 10:24 am
While I’ve been using Moodle with my Art Club, I prefer the comment features available with wikis (Wikispaces is my favorite so far) and/or Drupal (with which I’ve just recently fallen in love). Drupal even has a feature that lets you create collaborative books, but I haven’t played with that yet.
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John Pederson // Dec 19th 2006 at 11:49 am
I’m working with a small school district right now (30 teachers) to build their curriculum within Google Docs. Go spend some time imagining your project over there.
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Bill Fitzgerald // Dec 19th 2006 at 10:03 pm
Hello, Bud,
Drupal.
I’m building a site right now in Drupal that meets this precise need.
It gives a collaborative workspace for groups, and can scale upwards to meet expanding membership.
I would recommend against google docs, as this will not scale upwards in a user friendly way. You also don’t have control over your data — but, admittedly, I’m a bit more finicky about that than most
Cheers,
Bill
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Nancy // Dec 20th 2006 at 6:32 am
Are you looking at each participant doing a writing and having others comment? Or are you looking at one document w/ comments and changes coming from all participants?
If the former, I would think that setting up individual forums for each participant would be the way to go so that the areas are clearly defined.
What topic(s) are you looking to write about?
Sounds like a very worthwhile project and something that the Web 2.0 is meant to support.
Good luck!
Nancy
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Art Lader // Dec 20th 2006 at 7:04 am
I would investigate Moodle. I use it all the time and it seems to me that it would be perfect for this endeavor.
Best regards,
Art Lader
http://4germanteachers.com
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Nani // Jan 6th 2007 at 5:33 pm
I’m doing a Professional Writer’s Retreat with the NYCWP this year. We’ve set up a Google Group to communicate with each other, and with Google Group’s file upload (in the beta version), you can share files.
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