More to Come!
What Is a Wiki and Why Should An Educator Care?
The term comes from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning quick or fast. A wiki is a type of website that allows users to add to and edit a page or site and is especially suited for collaboration. Wiki also sometimes refers to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that make such a website run. Wikipedia is, by far, the world's largest English-language wiki. Most wikis offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full text search.
Some wikis allow completely unrestricted access so that people are able to contribute to the site without necessarily having to register as they usually would at other interactive websites such as Internet forums or chat sites.
Wikis can be used in education for collaborative writing processes. They offer a read-to-use means to produce web sites and blogs whether the students have web design experience or not. A few ways to use wikis in class are:
- Creating simple websites
- Developing projects with peer review
- Tracking a group project's progress
- Posting class notes and reviews
- Creating a Glossary
- Developing a series of topics
- Creating a book
- Discussing a topic or procedure
While wikis are very accessible to nearly anyone with good or bad intentions, they can verify the validity of additions to the entries. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is a "Recent Changes" page—a list showing recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given timeframe. Some wikis can filter the list for profanity, etc. Wiki vandalism can be a problem but most communities are self-policing and deal with inappropriate changes within minutes or hours. Of course educational wikis should always be created with clear parameters and supervised closely. Thanks to www.wikipedia.com