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writely

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 6 months ago

 

 

 

[writely]

xxhttp://www.writely.com

 

 

summary of the application

writely was one of the first collaborative writing tools to appear on the market and it has remained in it's position as a leader ever since. Writely provides a word processing workspace that all members of a team can work on the same document, even at the same time! it employees a wysiwyg environment to make writely comfortable to use by anyone who has been using a client side word processor. because it is also a wiki solution, revisions are tracked and you can compare to versions and make choices to merge their content. A document created in writely can be saved in several document formats (html, doc, pdf, open office) or you can publish it to your blog.

 

personal effectiveness xxx

using writely alone is possible but why use this as a simplified word processor? whats interesting is that as a word processor, it's average. as a wiki, ditto. as a blog authoring tool, again average. as an editing program, maybe slightly below average. but the combination of the three is dynamite. once you invite your colleagues to a document, writely begins to sing. with a little bit of experience in editing, a team can really accelerate the time it takes to review and complete a co-created document.

 

a few things i'd like to see different to make it an even better tool would be a simple way for writely to let me know when something has been changed. sure, i can go back and look at the various revisions and the comparison tool makes it a bit easier. but if the parts of the document that had been changed were somehow noted, perhaps with a superscript, it would make writely a much more powerful tool.

 

i'd also like to have a notification tool. the do provide an RSS feed for each page, but they warn you that the rss feed will pick up every change made and make it public via the rss. i just want to know that there has been a change to the document so i can go look at what has been changed.

 

learning effectiveness xxx

for many of the same reasons stated above, writely is a solid tool for learning situations. it's easy to get up and running with very little admin effort; provides teammates with anytime, anywhere access; and keeps track of every revision and who made it. (the last being helpful in team conflict situations or for examining workload balance issues.

 

from large team, project based learning situations to two partners brainstorming writely is definitely a tool that can be leveraged to improve a learning experience.

 

that said, from a learning perspective, there are deficiencies. for more formal learning usage, writely clearly would be benefit from a citations and bibliography creation tool that would keep track of documents or clips that team members add to the document. there is also no ability to create superscripts for endnotes or footnotes. finally, it would be quite beneficial to be able to either merge multiple documents into one large document or, vis a versa, break up a planned large document into smaller pieces to be recompiled later.

 

coolness xxx

writely was way cool when it first appeared on the market several years ago. simultaneous editing and revision history in an online collaborative environment was amazing. then. now its competitors have caught up while writely didn't grow very much. for as long as i can remember, writely has had a "beta meter" where users are asked to vote on how close writely is to being ready for 1.0. after a couple of years, the beta meter reads 62%. that's pretty uncool.

 

personal effectiveness=
learning effectiveness=
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do you know a competitor to this application?

if you know of a competitor to writely and it's not in the list below, feel free to add it to the list by filling out the form to the right. that will put it on my radar screen for possible review.

thanks!

 

 

topic homesummary tableeelearning wikieelearning blogfaq

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