Benefits of Using Wikis in the Classroom

Facilitates Collaborative Authoring
Using a wiki in the classroom gives students the opportunity to author in a collaborative environment. The benefits of collaborative authoring include:

• Learning from others. Collaborative authoring allows students to learn from one another – both in terms of viewing each other’s content but also by seeing the quality of other students’ work. In a traditional classroom, a student writes a paper, the teacher grades it, and then returns it to the student. Other students rarely have the opportunity to see and therefore learn from the information in that paper. Seeing other students’ work on a continuous basis can cause a student to evaluate his or her own work and see how it compares in quality. The comparison may cause the student to raise his or her work to a higher level.
• Developing a higher level of critical thinking. Students can develop critical thinking skills by critiquing other students’ information and learning how to defend their views when critiqued by other students.
• Deepening investigative skills. Working collaboratively on one document can encourage a student to do more investigative work. When information is critiqued as incorrect or underdeveloped, the author is encouraged to do additional research to respond to the critiques.
• Developing skills for negotiating conflict and facilitating effective teamwork. Professors at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi found that working on a wiki helps co-authors negotiate conflict. In Wiki As a Collaborative Writing Tool, they write that “conflict … is an inherent part of the collaborative process…Wikis provide a means to negotiate conflict and to build upon the positive aspects of conflict. In writing and working collaboratively with wikis, users must create and agree on the structures, forms, and methods that are necessary to accomplish their collaborative task….[The] required negotiation of space can lead to a better understanding of the social processes that underlie any collaborative activity. In these ways, wikis not only build constructive communities of writers, but also accommodate differences among members of these communities, which in turn can allow all voices to contribute to the conversation.”
• Building a class community. Working together in a collaborative process helps class members meet one another and build mutually beneficial scholarly relationships.

Empowers Students to Create Knowledge
In a traditional classroom, the instructor provides most of the content and students absorb and interpret that content. With wikis, you can give students the opportunity to provide much of the course content.

Also, professors using wikis are finding that when wikis are well done, the wiki can serve as content for subsequent versions of the class. In this way, students benefit from a sense of pride that their work continues and provides value for future students. Professors benefit by offloading some of the work of content creation, so that they can do more value-added instructional work.

Reflects Newly-emerging Teacher-student Paradigm
In today’s world, students are more active participants in a course’s content and flow. At Boston College, for example, clicker systems are being introduced, in which students give instantaneous responses to instructor questions. Their responses can affect the amount of information the instructor presents on a topic, the flow of the class, or future course presentations. Some control of the class is being passed from the teacher to the student. In a similar way, wikis can pass the creation of some of the course content from the teacher to the student.

Prepares Students for the Post-university World
Wikis are increasingly being used in the corporate world, where managers see the value of collaborative authoring. Wikis used in corporations can produce valuable information quickly, utilizing the expertise of individual company employees. Marc Prensky, a designer of educational material, observes that “we now see much less tolerance in the workspace for passive situations such as lectures, corporate classrooms and traditional meetings. As the younger generation moves up the managerial ranks, it is likely that such old-fashioned managerial standbys will be replaced by more active experiences.”

Encourages Creativity
In Blogging Clicks with Colleges, Washington Post writer Susan Kinzie writes that “…at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy in and out of topics with music, photos, and video pulling readers along…Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking, and questioning.”