Wiki's

Our second post on the MBSW Learning Technologies blog will explain Wiki's.

Once again we will first take a look at the definition given by Wikipedia

'A wiki (IPA: [?w?.ki?] or [?wi?.ki?] [1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.'

The benefits of a Wiki is that they can be used as collaborative software between many users and the information is then available to the greater population via the internet.

Some of the education uses of Wiki's can be found below:-

1)Teamwork and collaboration, If learning is indeed a social activity, wiki's afford an opportunity for the social construction of knowledge where students and teachers are not simply engaged in developing their own information but actively involved in creating knowledge that will benefit other students.

2) Wiki's can be used for group projects, taking collaborative notes, creating shared lesson plans , creating presentations , creating study guides, creating books.

The possibilities for using wiki's in education are only limited by one's imagination and time.

Some free hosted wiki sites are listed below :-
WikiDot, PBWiki, Wikihost