Teaching with Wikis

A wiki is a specially designed Web site that appears as a Web document that people can view and edit through a Web browser. The best-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia whose contents anyone can edit or update its contents.

The information in a wiki document is easy to view, edit, format, and organize. Working with a wiki is similar to editing a Word document. It is easy to upload documents or pictures to a wiki, and create links to documents or relevant passages in documents. Because of its ease of use, wikis require a minimum of training for professors and students.

Each time a user submits a change to a wiki, that revision becomes the current version of the wiki, and the previous version is saved. A student or teacher can always view a prior version, and compare one version to another. Also, a user can easily restore a previous version to make it the current version.

While the technical use of a wiki is very easy, the challenge is facilitating productive interaction between the wiki members. The basis of any wiki is its community. A wiki works well when the community of people who work on it respect one another and have an investment in a high-quality end product. A well-functioning community can typically produce valuable information of higher quality and more quickly than can any individual author.