Basics: What in the world is a wiki?
Roll over the questions at left to unravel the wonderful world of wikis.
I know the basics. Take me to some ideas for how to use a wiki in my teaching.
Basics: What in the world is a wiki?
Roll over the questions at left to unravel the wonderful world of wikis.
I know the basics. Take me to some ideas for how to use a wiki in my teaching.
What's a wiki?
A wiki is a web site that lets any visitor become a participant: you can create or edit the actual site contents without any special technical knowledge or tools. All you need is a computer with an Internet connection. A wiki is continuously “under revision.” It is a living collaboration whose purpose is the sharing of the creative process and product by many. One famous example is Wiki-pedia, an online encyclopedia with no “authors” but millions of contributors and editors. The word "wiki" comes from Hawaiian language, meaning "quick" or "fast."
Who uses wikis?
Wikis are used in the “real world” (outside of K-12 schools) by people collaborating on projects or trying to share things online, such as family information and photos, technical information from users of a product, data from a research and development project, wine expertise, travel journals from abroad, club or specialty information, or projects like collaborative cookbooks.
Sometimes they are used for free expression, such as a youth group online graffiti space. College and university courses seem to be using wikis far more than the K-12 community right now. In K-12 education, wikis are being used by educators to conduct or follow-up after professional development workshops or as a communication tool with parents. The greatest potential, however, lies in student participation in the ongoing creation and evolution of the wiki.
What is the difference between a wiki and a blog?
A blog, or web log, shares writing and multimedia content in the form of “posts” (starting point entries) and “comments” (responses to the posts). While commenting, and even posting, are open to the members of the blog or the general public, no one is able to change a comment or post made by another. The usual format is post-comment-comment-comment, and so on. For this reason, blogs are often the vehicle of choice to express individual opinions.
A wiki has a far more open structure and allows others to change what one person has written. This openness may trump individual opinion with group consensus.