Counting down...

EVOnline begins tomorrow with an opening ceremony at WorldBridges at 15h GMT, or 10 a.m. EST! Last year, I completely missed the opening webcast (didn't yet know what a webcast was!) and only listened to it a couple of weeks later. This time I feel more like I am on the same page as everyone else.

The BaW07 Yahoo Group (YG) has been very active in the past weeks, over 300 messages; most of them are self-introductions from some of the 200+ participants and responses to them. I remember how overwhelmed I was last year when I first visited the YG and found hundreds of posts already there; I never found the time to go back to the beginning and read them all. I am sure many people will have the same experience this year, but I suppose it can't be helped. People are excited and anxious to start interacting, and those who are less proficient at web tools and need a little prompting will not figure out what to do until the course actually begins on Monday.

The B4B group has been more patient, waiting to begin until the official starting day.

In the meantime I have been playing around with wikis for my 005 class. First I tried a WYSIWYG editor in pbwiki, but I had trouble with the sidebar: it looks fine in editing mode but once saved, looks awful. From Dafne, I learned that this is not my fault: it's the editor. She has the exact same problem! So I created a second pbwiki using the classic editor. However, it took me forever to get my pages looking the way I wanted them to, since I am just learning WikiStyle. Then I tried a wikispaces wiki, but that too was not easy to do quickly, so finally I decided to go with the first one and try to ignore the ugly sidebar. I've complained to pbwiki though. Maybe they will fix it sooner, rather than later. One can always hope!

Anyway, becoming proficient using wikis is one of my goals for this year (learning more about podcasting is another one). I found out last year that trial and error is the way to learn.