After all, we can use wiki together!

 And I welcome you again, my dear friends!

Today I want to tell you what a wiki is and how to use it as an educational tool.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows many people to create and edit online documents or web pages without specialist programming knowledge. Many different media types can be embedded into a wiki page, such as text, images, video and RSS feeds.

The person who sets up a wiki can offer other users password protected access, restricting the number of people able to edit or create content.

As each edit is documented, it is possible to see a chronological list of changes to content, and even to revert pages back to previous versions.

Many wikis also contain a range of other collaborative tools such as message boards to help facilitate the collaborative process.

Examples of wikis

There are a range of open web devices available that are free to use, or those where access is limited to a certain groups of users, and are part of a larger Learning Management System (LMS):

- Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org (an open source public encyclopaedia) 

- Wetpaint www.wetpaintcentral.com (open source wikis)

- Moodle www.moodle.com (open source LMS containing a wiki feature)

- Blackboard www.blackboard.com (proprietary LMS containing a wiki feature)

Key benefits

- Students don’t have to spend a long time learning how to use the technology, as the main functions mirrored those of the more familiar word processor. Only very basic formatting skills are required to use a wiki

- Students can work asynchronously, meaning that not all students need to be present at one time or place to efectively contribute to group work

- Teachers can easily see which students are doing the work in a group assignment because every addition or change is documented, making assessment more fair and easier for the teacher

- Similarly, the quality of the students’ contributions can easily be monitored

- Students develop critical analysis skill and the ability to constructively criticise the work of their peers

The collaborative tools within a wiki can offer great opportunities for collaborative learning. I hope this information will be useful when planning your own use of the wikis in online group work situations.

That's it for today, thank you for being with me!