Cooperation tools: wikis vs Y!G (the choice)

I am managing a project where teachers of several schools, some far apart, have to cooperate. So I had to decide which sharing tool could be suitable for our needs.

As a first choice, after previous experiences, I thought that a wiki could be the best option: a wiki hosted on my school's web site or rather on an online service as pbwiki, with restricted access to the teachers involved in the project.

Then I remembered Yahoo!Groups, which I had used in past occasions only in a very limited way, and mainly out of curiosity, the choice fell on this latter tool.

First of all it's simpler than a wiki, which would have been a totally new experience for most of my colleagues. The major source of problems for Y!G, as far as I know, is a subscription process that's not completely linear, with the need to create a Y! profile and this sometimes gets the process stuck.

Yahoo!Groups is surely less flexible and more standardized and does not allow all the management freedom characterizing a wiki. But perhaps for teachers just learning to use web tools to cooperate and work together, a wiki is overdimensioned and too complex without an adequate of initial training.

Besides, Y!G is essentially a mailing list, and this is the feature primarily interesting in my case. The file repository is enough for contents to be shared and modified, and news can be transmitted through collective messages.

I plan to go back to this topic at the end of the project, to give a more factual assessment of this use of Y!G.

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