Thing #46: Stixy



Last month our colleague Kathryn came down the hall to tell us about a new application she’d discovered, which she thought would make a great Nebraska Learns 2.0 “Thing”: Stixy!



If you’ve ever seen Kathryn’s desk and office walls, which are covered with semi-organized patterns of post-it notes, you’d understand why this application appeals to her! Stixy is the online equivalent of a bulletin board or physical desktop, with the added value (when desired) of collaboration.



Kathryn at her Post-It-Note covered desk



Kathryn's bulletin board

Stixyboards

Stixy’s tagline proclaims it is “For Flexible Online Creation, Collaboration, and Sharing.” With a free Stixy account, you can create as many Stixyboards as you like. Keep some private for personal projects; invite friends, family, or colleagues to view and/or collaborate with you on others. The choice is yours!

Each Stixyboard you create provides you with a work area where you can place your content. Stixy doesn’t use a fixed grid, so you can physically arrange your content in any way you’d like – just like you do on your desk or bulletin board: you can line content up in neat horizontal or vertical rows, scatter it randomly, or even layer or stack it.

Content Widgets

Content is added to a Stixyboard by dragging and dropping a widget onto your work space. There are currently four types of widgets to choose from:

• Note – This widget is the equivalent of a post-it note. Notes can be resized to accommodate anything from a couple lines of text to multiple paragraphs. Background color and opacity, as well as font color, size, and style can be customized. You can also include links out to web pages.
    
• Photo – The photo widget allows you to upload a photo to your Stixyboard. Supported file types include JPG, GIF, and PNG. Once uploaded, you can resize or rotate your photo, drag it to a different location, or add a handful of effects.
   
• Document – The document widget allows you to upload various types of files to your Stixyboard – Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, sound files and movie files. If you’re collaborating with others, they will need the required programs on their computers to open the files, but it is a nice alternative to sharing files by attaching them to email messages.
   
• Todo – Todo widgets allow you to create date-specific reminders that can generate email alerts to you and your collaborators if you choose.

Collaboration and Privacy

There are several options available for collaboration. If you are working on a project with a small group of people, click on the “Options” link associated with the Stixyboard you plan to use for your collaboration. This opens the Options menu, which allows you to send email invitations to the specific people you’d like to collaborate with.

A Stixyboard can be private, meaning only you and your collaborators can view and edit it. You can also set up guest access to allow people other than your collaborators to view the Stixyboard. Guest access is provided via a special guest URL.

If you’re interested in broader collaboration, you can even allow guests to add, remove, and edit widgets. If you choose this later option you may want to require guests to enter a password before they get access to the page.

Here are guest access URLs and passwords to a couple of Stixy boards I’ve created:

• Thing #46: Stixy: http://www.stixy.com/guest/107872 (password: ilovelibraries)
   
• Nebraska Learns 2.0: http://www.stixy.com/guest/107712 (password: ilovelibraries)

As guests, I’m only allowing you to view the Thing #46 Stixyboard, but I’ve given you permission to both view and edit the Nebraska Learns 2.0 Stixyboard. (So if you have any ideas for future “Things,” add them to the list!)

There are a couple of important factors to keep in mind when making decisions about who can edit a Stixyboard. First, for better or worse anyone with edit permission can change or delete text and widgets added by others. Second, since additions, changes, and deletions aren’t tracked or attributed to specific collaborators or guests, there’s no built-in way to identify who did what, whether positive or negative.

For these reasons you can see the value of limiting editing privileges to a few trusted colleagues in situations where content integrity is important. When opening up participation to a broader group of individuals it will be important to establish expectations in terms of behavior, content, and self-identification.

For more information on how to use Stixy, I recommend this short YouTube tutorial. You may also want to view the following Stixyboard examples:

1. Work collaboration (from Stixy)
2. Research an online purchase (from Stixy)
3. Photo album (from Stixy)
4. Collaborative brainstorming
5. PTA Information Distribution
6. Teacher Page
7. Vocabulary
8. Information about sound

Assignment

1. Create a Stixy account and play around with it. Try out the various widgets. Experiment with formatting, resizing, and arranging. Figure out how to create guest access.
    
2. Write a two-part blog post. In part one, briefly describe your experience with Stixy. What did you like or dislike about it?
   
   In part two, speculate about who in your community might have an interest in or use for Stixy? Would parents be interested in learning about it? Genealogists? Church groups? Are there ways you could use Stixy in the library, either internally or with your community? Could you use it as a staff bulletin board? With your teen advisory group? With book club groups?
     
3. Finally, mock up a Stixyboard demonstrating one of the possible uses you wrote about in your blog post. Include the guest URL to your Stixyboard in your blog post.