http://orbs.com
The basics
Orbs is a ‘website in a web application’. In recent years there has been a trend towards using wikis and blogging engines to create websites quickly, emphasising content and process over design and style and structure. However, a website, closely structured and with a clear navigation system, remains an important part of web-based publishing and information exchange. Orbs enables you to build a site quickly and easily, hosted on the Orbs platform. While some of the more professional features require payment, much of Orbs is free. It emphasises good, aesthetically pleasing templates, an easy editor and is “great when there are lots of pages. Its unique table of contents and an always available search feature work for websites with 5 or 500 pages.”.
What needs to be explored
Would Orbs provide anything more than a wiki or blog based system, given that those also have very powerful collaborative tools? Is the editor as easy as it looks? Does the lack of ‘many editors’ (free version only allows 2) hamper this application too much, or is it actually more realistic for people to use it individually. Ultimately, the usefulness of Orbs might be msot hampered by the fact that it is a tool for creating websites: it does it well, but many of the key secondary components (publicising, sharing the site, building interaction) are not as well handled. Exploration is needed to discover how this tool would work, for what students in what settings.
Pedagogic Challenge
Students creating content for the web is the main challenge. Students often believe their primary audience is ‘the teacher’ (since they validate learning and assess the work and, put simply, because education is all about the student-teacher dynamic … or so we are led to believe). They usually accept that a secondary audience, perhaps also primary, is fellow students. Even in courses of study which prioritise and explicitly teach students about online communications, many students still do not grasp that writing about something is not the same as doing it: they need to be led into the mode of knowledge work that explicitly demands their online contribution.
Alternatives
The closest usable equivalent to Orbs is Webon. However, There are several ‘build a webpage’ type sites (for example, Glogster) but they tend to be aimed at niche markets and are not really about creating sites, just publishing a cool (often graphics-oriented) page. Openzine allows for collaborative development of an online magazine. However, few sites are quite like Orbs, or work as well. Pen.io is a much simpler alternative, discussed also in the ‘unexplored’ tools category.
