Wikis Collaborative Learning

Nowadays, Internet is providing an extremely useful medium for collaboration and knowledge aggregation. Wiki at first sight, looks something strange and not in our minds at all, the concept that "any one can edit “is still something not sure of. Nevertheless, wikis have now become attractive and the recent phenomenon Wikipedia, the most powerful wiki presently known, provides a proof- of- concept for the “anyone can edit” system. It is not that wiki is still not in our minds or that wiki is really strange. It is that we are unaccustomed to collaborative work. Knowledge work is inherently collaborative. Wikis are a great way to learn to collaborate. Wikipedia is one of the examples of wiki use by the community and sets an example of how collaboration may work among people. Seeing the success of Wikipedia, there is a question of how education might benefit from using wikis for collaborative learning. Although wikis are widely used among ordinary Internet users, the specific benefits from wiki in relation to education are still not very clear and needs further exploration. Educational research could benefit much if a deeper understanding of how wiki can contribute to collaborative learning is developed.

Wiki is Hawaiian for "quick". Wiki is also a software tool that allows users to freely create and edit hyperlinked Web pages using a web browser. Wiki implementations typically use a simple syntax for users to create new pages and cross-links between pages on the fly. In addition to the main open source version there are also many non-commercial and commercial clones and some "wiki farms" (places where you can set up a wiki without needing your own server) such as SeedWiki.

Example of Wikis

• Probably the best known Wiki is Wikipedia, a surprisingly useful online encyclopaedia to which anybody can contribute. Wikipedia is said to be world's largest wiki website, containing more than 200,000 articles by early 2004. 
• Disinfopedia is another, much smaller, Wiki that describes itself as "a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations, and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." 
• Another nice example is the Moveable Type Knowledge-base wiki - a collaboratively created and maintained collection of how-to information about the Moveable Type software system. 
• Liftwatch.org is a community portal for people working on the concept of a space elevator and uses TikiWiki, an open source wiki-based content management system
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Using Wikis in Learning:

• Simple lesson plan involving getting students to collaboratively construct a micro encyclopedia (a scaled down version of Wikipedia) on a particular topic.
• CourseForum is a commercial wiki system designed specifically for e-learning. 
• "To really use a wiki, the participants need to be in control of the content- you have to give it over fully." - Heather