Barry Bakin's dashboard

No replies for 3 months? Does anybody know?

You might look into gaggle.net as an email provider that is accessible from schools since no accounts are "secret." Everything is viewable by administrators and teachers and filtered in both directions (in-going and out-going mail) with key words diverting inbound and outbound messages into the teacher's mailbox so they can be reviewed before arriving at their destinations. There's a free version (with school appropriate advertisers) as well as pay versions without the advertising. Account management isn't very burdensome and it's fairly easy to sign up students individually or in batches (even faster). You're not telling your students they "have to have an email to do some work," you're providing them with one that is suitable for school use.

How about an update from the pbwiki tech people and staff about where internal pbwiki discussions have led? Have you developed anything to resolve this issue yet?

In my case, I lean toward the invite key solution because I work with adult immigrant English language learners and I just want them to be able to work on the collaborative pages I've set up for them without having to jump through too many hoops. I don't really have to worry about malicious postings with my population but I do occasionally have to deal with students erasing things inadvertantly and being able to revert to a prior version has solved that issue for me. Many of out students don't have email addresses (nor computers for that matter) so an email-based system is not viable for them.

Seems to me that the proposed solution allowing the wiki creator to choose between an email log in and an invite key at the time of wiki creation is really the best direction to take if technically doable. As for the issue of users being confused when visiting wikis with different systems, the log-page could just state "The creator of this wiki chose an email-based log-in system" or "The creator of this wiki chose an "invite-key" based system" as appropriate. This wording would imply that there are other systems in use so that when new users visit a wiki with the other type of system, they would be a bit more prepared for that eventuality.

While I was considering moving to version 2 of pbwiki, I don't think I will be able to do so until this issue is resolved. I also train and introduce wikis to other teachers in my division who have similar student populations so I think I'll have to recommend to them to stay with 1.0 as well.

Have a wiki prepared for your presentations! On that wiki, you can list URLs of your favorite wikis that you can refer to during your presentation, create "tryout" pages or post videos that you can use to demonstrate editing techniques, and post the URLs of wikis that the participants have created if you're doing a hands-on workshop. As time goes by, you can "check-in" with wikis that were created during past presentations and show the new participants how much the prior participants have progressed in the time since they first created their wikis with you. You can view my presentation wiki at http://barrytrainsu.pbwiki.com/