Thing 4: Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content. Wikipedia, the online, open-community encyclopedia, is the largest and likely the most well known of these knowledge-sharing tools. Wikis have many benefits, are easy to use and have many applications.

Some of the benefits of wikis:

• Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
• Tracking tools allow you to easily keep up on what has been changed and by whom.
• Earlier versions of a page can be rolled back and viewed when needed.
• Users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content.
• Multiple pages can be added to one wiki.

For an overview of wikis, watch this video:



Educational uses of wikis are diverse. Check out these examples:

• University of Connecticut Library: Technical Services Wiki: this wiki is used to document all things associated with the tech services area of the UConn library - including daily logs completed by student staff members.
• University of New South Wales: Censorship & Responsibility (course). This wiki was created collaboratively by students taking the course - click links to the entry page of The Theory Book, and you'll see this (along with The Case Study Book) was created collaboratively by the students in the course. If you are interested in seeing how many authors contributed to a particular page, click "History" in the upper right.
• The French Revolution Wikipedia and Ant Farm Diaries: Clay Burrell, teaching World History in Seoul South Korea first has his students create a wiki (Wikipedia fashion) for the French Revolution. Then the students adopt characters from the time, and write diary entries the characters. Mr. Burrell's description: "...using the background knowledge compiled in the class mini-Wikipedia, students "write to learn" by writing role-play diaries of characters from the different social classes during the French Revolution. All characters interact with other characters in diaries written during the main events of the French Revolution." Scroll to the bottom of the page to get links to the actual diary entries.
• Coe College May Term 2009: The Psychology of Peace & Conflict. Sara Farrell's May Term course used a wiki prior to traveling to Ireland to better understand the inter-relationships of various political and civil conflicts within the country. Students researched and wrote about primary topics, and then combed through each others' research to make connections.
• Advanced Writing Workshop created a wiki last year about Professional Writing on Web 2.0. Check it out here.
  

Discovery Exercise:

1. Visit and read about facebook and other topics on the wiki AWW students created last year, Online Writing for Professionals.
   
2. Now, contribute to 13 things for Writers wiki, Using Facebook Professionally. Read the directions and answer the questions on the wiki home page.
   
3. Then copy & paste your comments from the wiki into a posting on your blog. This will be your official post for this thing.