Manila Matures... - Will Richardson

So it’s taken me until now to really start digging into Manila 9.5. I’m starting to set up sites for teachers and students for the news school year, and I’m just realizing how much more Manila can do in terms of determining who sees what and how. It’s going to take some time to play, and I’m already trying to enlist some teacher volunteers to push the envelope a bit for me here, but here are some pretty cool aspects right out of the box:

Teachers and students can set up private posting relationships on individual sites. For instance, if I want to respond to a piece of writing and maybe even add a grade, we can do that privately on the student blog by creating a separate “cohort.” So there may be a lot of posts that only the two of us can see and interact with.

And cohorts are pretty flexible. With a little thought, you can create all sorts of content subgroups within the site. For instance, if three students are working together, they can now make all that work for each other’s eyes only, and then publish the final copies for just the class or the world to see. Very cool.

Students can even set time paramaters for posts to be readable by cohorts. That would be great if you were asking students to give feedback by a certain time.

You can even make the built in Manila aggregator available to only certain people. Same with search and access to site stats.

It even has a wiki-esque versioning capability allowing you to see who has done what and restoring earlier versions of content with one click.

I know I’ve been hoping to do a comparison of the tools out there, and I still mean to as soon as I get a few more days in the week. But with this upgrade, Manila has really given teachers and students a lot more flexibility in the ways they can work and collaborate without the whole world watching. And that has been a concern of many Manila teachers. I’m looking forward to seeing how it’ll perform in practice.

Now, if only they’d build in comment approval…
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