WIKIS
What is it?
A wiki is a Web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a Web browser and access to the Internet. This means that any visitor to the wiki can change its content if they desire. While the potential for mischief exists, wikis can be surprisingly robust, open-ended, collaborative group sites.
Who is doing it?
The first wikis appeared in the mid-1990s.
The First Wiki: Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995. His "WikiWikiWeb" lets software developers create a library of "software patterns." The name "Wiki" was inspired by the Hawaiian word wiki or wiki-wiki, which means "quick" and is often used as a term for taxis and airport shuttles. The WikiWikiWeb still exists.
Scientists and engineers used them to create dynamic knowledge bases. Wiki content—contributed “on the fly” by subject-matter specialists—could be immediately (and widely) viewed and commented on.
Adapted as an instructional technology in the past few years, wikis are being used for a wide variety of collaborative activities.
In addition to compiling information, faculty and staff in higher education use wikis as repositories for meeting notes. Agenda items are contributed prior to a meeting; notes added during the meeting are saved in a public archive. The ability to export notes to Microsoft Word makes reporting easy and adds versatility to the meeting wiki. Some institutions are experimenting with wikis as e-portfolios. Artifacts within a wiki-folio are easily shared when the wiki is used as a presentation tool.
Educators and students, as well as amateurs and professionals (artists, writers, collectors), have found wikis useful in expanding community involvement and interest in their subjects and activities. One of the most commonly used wikis is Wikipedia—an online, editable encyclopedia that is popular with students. Wikis are also making inroads as rough Web-content composition tools for both faculty and students.
How does it work?
Technically, a wiki is a combination of a CGI script and a collection of plain text files that allows users to create Web pages “on the fly.” All it takes is a connection to the Internet and a Web browser. When you click a wiki page’s “Edit” link, the script sends the raw text file to your browser in an editable form, allowing you to modifythe content of the page. Pressing the “Save” button sends the modified text back to the wiki server, which replaces the existing text file with your changed version for all to see. When you request a wiki page, the script gathers the corresponding text file, changes its marked-up text into HTML, turns user-selected words into hyperlinks, inserts this information into a page template, and sends the result to your browser.
Why is it significant?
Wikis offer a powerful yet flexible collaborative communication tool for developing content-specific Web sites. Because wikis grow and evolve as a direct result of people adding material the site, they can address a variety of pedagogical needs student involvement, group activities, and so on. Since wikis reside on the Internet, students can access and participate from any location, provided they have Internet access.
From an instructional technology perspective, wikis allow faculty and students to engage in collaborative activities that might not be possible in a classroom. Their flexibility will encourage broader adoption—by both students and faculty.
What are the downsides?
Because users can modify the content of a wiki (add to, edit, and delete materials), allowing such manipulation of the site’s information carries some risks. Thus, wikis are often monitored to ensure that inappropriate language, spam, and incorrect or inappropriate content are not allowed. This can be both time-consuming and personnel-intensive. As a result, many wikis require authorization so only group members can modify content.
A wiki is essentially a database created by a group rather than an individual. Structuring the initial content in such a database for easy access can be a challenge—one that faculty might not have encountered before. How one accesses information on the wiki, navigates the site, creates internal and external links to additional information, and so forth needs to be addressed early.
Another shortcoming of a wiki (albeit a minor one) is that it represents the collective perspective of the group that uses it—a wiki has a collaborative bias. Over time, the values, perspectives, and opinions of its users can become embedded in a wiki.
Where is it going?
Since wikis are easy to edit, they carry an inherent potential to change how we construct knowledge repositories on the Web. Wikis allow groups to form around specific topics. The low barrier to entry makes them the equivalent of shared digital paper—literally anyone with access to the Web can post, modify, and delete content on that site. Because they are so easy to use, the technology recedes into the background, allowing anyone to become a publisher. Wikis show great potential as collaborative spaces that may become semi-authoritative voices on particular topics.
Wikipedia, for example, has become an often-used reference, especially among students, many of whom see it as a reliable source of information.
What are the implications for teaching and learning?
Wikis might be the easiest and most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. Their inherent simplicity provides students with direct (and immediate) access to a site’s content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative project activities. A wiki’s versioning capability can show the evolution of thought processes as students interact with the site and its contents. These collaborative projects help promote “pride of authorship” and ownership in the team’s activities. In addition, wikis are being used as e-portfolios, illustrating their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. Collaboration using a wiki is not limited to students. Faculty can use wikis to collaborate on projects, whether editing a textbook, preparing a journal article, or assembling a syllabus or reading list. Wikis might also prove to be an ideal vehicle for soliciting ongoing input for research or projects where community input can help inform and direct subsequent investigation. The possibilities for using wikis as the platform for collaborative projects are limited only by one’s imagination and time. Wiki enabled projects can provide various levels of site access and control to team members, offering a fine-tuning element that enhances the teaching and learning experience.
WHAT IS SO GOOD ABOUT WIKIS?
Wikis Simplify Editing Your Website: Each page on a wiki has an Edit link. If you want to change something on the page, click the link, and the wiki will display a simple editing screen. When you finish making changes, submit them by clicking a button, and, Voila! Your changes show up on the Website.
Wikis Use Simple Markup: Even for geeky types like me, thinking about HTML and formatting gets in the way of good, clear writing. Wikis solve this problem by writing the HTML for you -- you only need to learn a few simple markup rules. These rules are designed to make wiki markup easy to write and read by real people.
Wikis Record Document Histories: If you make a mistake, don't worry. A good wiki will save plenty of old copies of your pages and will let you revert to an older version of a page. In fact, many Wikis will display a comparison, called a diffˆ, which shows you the exact changes you have made to your page over time.
Creating Links Is Simple With Wikis: Wikis store all your Website's content in an internal hypertext database. The wiki knows about every page you have and about every link you make. If you use a wiki, you don't have to worry about the location of files or the format of your tags. Simply name the page, and the wiki will automatically create a link for you.
What is it?
A wiki is a Web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a Web browser and access to the Internet. This means that any visitor to the wiki can change its content if they desire. While the potential for mischief exists, wikis can be surprisingly robust, open-ended, collaborative group sites.
Who is doing it?
The first wikis appeared in the mid-1990s.
The First Wiki: Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995. His "WikiWikiWeb" lets software developers create a library of "software patterns." The name "Wiki" was inspired by the Hawaiian word wiki or wiki-wiki, which means "quick" and is often used as a term for taxis and airport shuttles. The WikiWikiWeb still exists.
Scientists and engineers used them to create dynamic knowledge bases. Wiki content—contributed “on the fly” by subject-matter specialists—could be immediately (and widely) viewed and commented on.
Adapted as an instructional technology in the past few years, wikis are being used for a wide variety of collaborative activities.
In addition to compiling information, faculty and staff in higher education use wikis as repositories for meeting notes. Agenda items are contributed prior to a meeting; notes added during the meeting are saved in a public archive. The ability to export notes to Microsoft Word makes reporting easy and adds versatility to the meeting wiki. Some institutions are experimenting with wikis as e-portfolios. Artifacts within a wiki-folio are easily shared when the wiki is used as a presentation tool.
Educators and students, as well as amateurs and professionals (artists, writers, collectors), have found wikis useful in expanding community involvement and interest in their subjects and activities. One of the most commonly used wikis is Wikipedia—an online, editable encyclopedia that is popular with students. Wikis are also making inroads as rough Web-content composition tools for both faculty and students.
How does it work?
Technically, a wiki is a combination of a CGI script and a collection of plain text files that allows users to create Web pages “on the fly.” All it takes is a connection to the Internet and a Web browser. When you click a wiki page’s “Edit” link, the script sends the raw text file to your browser in an editable form, allowing you to modifythe content of the page. Pressing the “Save” button sends the modified text back to the wiki server, which replaces the existing text file with your changed version for all to see. When you request a wiki page, the script gathers the corresponding text file, changes its marked-up text into HTML, turns user-selected words into hyperlinks, inserts this information into a page template, and sends the result to your browser.
Why is it significant?
Wikis offer a powerful yet flexible collaborative communication tool for developing content-specific Web sites. Because wikis grow and evolve as a direct result of people adding material the site, they can address a variety of pedagogical needs student involvement, group activities, and so on. Since wikis reside on the Internet, students can access and participate from any location, provided they have Internet access.
From an instructional technology perspective, wikis allow faculty and students to engage in collaborative activities that might not be possible in a classroom. Their flexibility will encourage broader adoption—by both students and faculty.
What are the downsides?
Because users can modify the content of a wiki (add to, edit, and delete materials), allowing such manipulation of the site’s information carries some risks. Thus, wikis are often monitored to ensure that inappropriate language, spam, and incorrect or inappropriate content are not allowed. This can be both time-consuming and personnel-intensive. As a result, many wikis require authorization so only group members can modify content.
A wiki is essentially a database created by a group rather than an individual. Structuring the initial content in such a database for easy access can be a challenge—one that faculty might not have encountered before. How one accesses information on the wiki, navigates the site, creates internal and external links to additional information, and so forth needs to be addressed early.
Another shortcoming of a wiki (albeit a minor one) is that it represents the collective perspective of the group that uses it—a wiki has a collaborative bias. Over time, the values, perspectives, and opinions of its users can become embedded in a wiki.
Where is it going?
Since wikis are easy to edit, they carry an inherent potential to change how we construct knowledge repositories on the Web. Wikis allow groups to form around specific topics. The low barrier to entry makes them the equivalent of shared digital paper—literally anyone with access to the Web can post, modify, and delete content on that site. Because they are so easy to use, the technology recedes into the background, allowing anyone to become a publisher. Wikis show great potential as collaborative spaces that may become semi-authoritative voices on particular topics.
Wikipedia, for example, has become an often-used reference, especially among students, many of whom see it as a reliable source of information.
What are the implications for teaching and learning?
Wikis might be the easiest and most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. Their inherent simplicity provides students with direct (and immediate) access to a site’s content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative project activities. A wiki’s versioning capability can show the evolution of thought processes as students interact with the site and its contents. These collaborative projects help promote “pride of authorship” and ownership in the team’s activities. In addition, wikis are being used as e-portfolios, illustrating their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. Collaboration using a wiki is not limited to students. Faculty can use wikis to collaborate on projects, whether editing a textbook, preparing a journal article, or assembling a syllabus or reading list. Wikis might also prove to be an ideal vehicle for soliciting ongoing input for research or projects where community input can help inform and direct subsequent investigation. The possibilities for using wikis as the platform for collaborative projects are limited only by one’s imagination and time. Wiki enabled projects can provide various levels of site access and control to team members, offering a fine-tuning element that enhances the teaching and learning experience.
WHAT IS SO GOOD ABOUT WIKIS?
Wikis Simplify Editing Your Website: Each page on a wiki has an Edit link. If you want to change something on the page, click the link, and the wiki will display a simple editing screen. When you finish making changes, submit them by clicking a button, and, Voila! Your changes show up on the Website.
Wikis Use Simple Markup: Even for geeky types like me, thinking about HTML and formatting gets in the way of good, clear writing. Wikis solve this problem by writing the HTML for you -- you only need to learn a few simple markup rules. These rules are designed to make wiki markup easy to write and read by real people.
Wikis Record Document Histories: If you make a mistake, don't worry. A good wiki will save plenty of old copies of your pages and will let you revert to an older version of a page. In fact, many Wikis will display a comparison, called a diffˆ, which shows you the exact changes you have made to your page over time.
Creating Links Is Simple With Wikis: Wikis store all your Website's content in an internal hypertext database. The wiki knows about every page you have and about every link you make. If you use a wiki, you don't have to worry about the location of files or the format of your tags. Simply name the page, and the wiki will automatically create a link for you.
Creating New Pages Is Simple With Wikis: Wikis let you link to pages that don't yet exist. Click on a link that points to a nonexistent page, and the wiki will ask you for initial content to put in the page. If you submit some initial content, the wiki will create the page. All links to that page (not just the one you clicked) will now point to the newly-created page.
Wikis Simplify Site Organization: As wikis work like hypertext databases, you can organize your page however you want. Many content management systems require you to plan classifications for your content before you actually create it. This can be helpful, but only if what you want to convey fits a rigid mould. With a wiki, you can organize your page into categories if you want, but you can also try other things. Instead of designing the site structure, many wiki site creators just let the structure grow with the content and the links inside their content. But you don't have to have it either way. I do all three on my own site. Visitors can navigate the site by following a storyline, drilling down through a hierarchy, or they can just browse with the natural flow of the internal links. Without the wiki, such complexity would be a nightmare. Now that I use a wiki, I also find my site structure easier to manage than when I used a template system and a set of categories.
Wikis Keep Track of All Your Stuff: Because a wiki stores everything in an internal hypertext database, it knows about all your links and all your pages. So it's easy for the wiki to show back links, a list of all the pages that linking to the current page. Since the wiki stores your document history, it can also list recent changes. Advanced wikis like the Wikipedia can even show a list of recent changes to pages that link to the current page.
Many Wikis are Collaborative Communities: The original wiki allows anyone to click the Edit button and change the Website. While this may seem odd, many wikis are able to do this successfully without major issues in terms of vandalism. Remember, the wiki stores the history of each page. For each vandal, there are probably ten people who actually need the information that was there before, and who will take the time to click the button and reset the page to its former contents. Many of the wikis handle this challenge differently. Some are completely open, some restrict access, and one even has a democratic error/vandalism reporting system. How you deal with this challenge depends on what you plan to use the Wiki for, as we'll see.
Wikis Encourage Good Hypertext: In my recent article, Caffeinate Your Hypertext, I wrote that wikis are the purest form of hypertext available on the Web today. Many wikis sport features that make hypertext geeks drool, but the features aren't the real reason wikis make great hypertext tools. They succeed because they make writing hypertext elegantly and easy. Effective Wiki writers don't have to be geeks. They just need to be able to type.
Wikis Simplify Site Organization: As wikis work like hypertext databases, you can organize your page however you want. Many content management systems require you to plan classifications for your content before you actually create it. This can be helpful, but only if what you want to convey fits a rigid mould. With a wiki, you can organize your page into categories if you want, but you can also try other things. Instead of designing the site structure, many wiki site creators just let the structure grow with the content and the links inside their content. But you don't have to have it either way. I do all three on my own site. Visitors can navigate the site by following a storyline, drilling down through a hierarchy, or they can just browse with the natural flow of the internal links. Without the wiki, such complexity would be a nightmare. Now that I use a wiki, I also find my site structure easier to manage than when I used a template system and a set of categories.
Wikis Keep Track of All Your Stuff: Because a wiki stores everything in an internal hypertext database, it knows about all your links and all your pages. So it's easy for the wiki to show back links, a list of all the pages that linking to the current page. Since the wiki stores your document history, it can also list recent changes. Advanced wikis like the Wikipedia can even show a list of recent changes to pages that link to the current page.
Many Wikis are Collaborative Communities: The original wiki allows anyone to click the Edit button and change the Website. While this may seem odd, many wikis are able to do this successfully without major issues in terms of vandalism. Remember, the wiki stores the history of each page. For each vandal, there are probably ten people who actually need the information that was there before, and who will take the time to click the button and reset the page to its former contents. Many of the wikis handle this challenge differently. Some are completely open, some restrict access, and one even has a democratic error/vandalism reporting system. How you deal with this challenge depends on what you plan to use the Wiki for, as we'll see.
Wikis Encourage Good Hypertext: In my recent article, Caffeinate Your Hypertext, I wrote that wikis are the purest form of hypertext available on the Web today. Many wikis sport features that make hypertext geeks drool, but the features aren't the real reason wikis make great hypertext tools. They succeed because they make writing hypertext elegantly and easy. Effective Wiki writers don't have to be geeks. They just need to be able to type.
