Last year I wrote a post on why I think wikis are so cool and I’d like to repeat and/or continue on this train of thought here.
First of all, if you don’t quite know what a wiki is, here’s a pretty decent three-minute fifty-two second explanation of how it works:
Okay, so now that you know what a wiki is, let’s consider some ways to put wikis to use in the classroom. First of all, I must emphasize that the main point of a wiki is to allow for collaboration with others. Wikis are thus perfect for designing projects that meet the second of the six NETS standards:
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.
Benefits include (but are not limited to):
- Wikis are websites, but you don’t need to know HTML to make them. While they may not look fancy, they are very, very easy to use.
- Wikis can be managed by multiple users. Thus, it’s much easier to collaborate on a piece of writing than if you use a Word document, for example, as you are all working on the same piece of writing rather than writing separate files which then have to be somehow merged at a later point.
- Wikis are good tools for writing drafts and getting feedback along the way. Since everyone can take a look at each previous saved version of the wiki (i.e. the way the wiki looked yesterday or last week), you can get a sense of its development over time. You can also restore a previous version if something important gets lost accidentally.
- Wikis are flexible. A group of users can gather and compile information on one or more pages, and then later on reorganize it as needed.
- Anytime you need a large number of people to add suggestions somewhere - e.g. a short review of their favorite book - a wiki is a very straight-forward way to go. A blog with a comments section would allow for the same thing, but each contributor would be unable to edit others’ entries or even their own past comments once submitted. (If the idea of editing other people’s entries sounds like a bad thing to you, remember that that is one of the key benefits of wiki software, and you can always change things back, compare the current saved versions with previous versions, and even restore previous versions of a page.)
- Wikis can also serve as a more permanent record of a group’s research findings, a repository for their shared knowledge gathered during research or lab work, for example.
- You can really harness the power of collective smarts with a wiki. Case in point: wikipedia. While particular articles on very obscure topics may not always be as reliable as your average Encyclopedia Britannica article, studies indicate the quality of most Wikipedia articles is every bit as high as the premier book encyclopedias. More importantly, it takes days or even just minutes before you can look up information on current events on wikipedia, while you may have to wait years for the next edition of an encyclopedia to include the same information.
