Why the Wiki? Collaboration is Key!

Organizing group work through email can be incredibly difficult...the trail of mail really leads nowhere and there is little coordination of the information to organize it and make it valuable to the members of the group. I know this sounds a little bit like a summary of the Creative Commons video entitled Wikis in Plain English, however it is also my experience in a project that I worked on with one of our University colleagues, Geoff Orme.

Geoff and I became partners for a project and began by emailing and later telephoning (can we remember that technology Web 2.0 ers?) each other to set up our project  and to figure out what each of us would contribute to the project. During one of our conversations Geoff suggested that we use a wiki. I said sure not really knowing what a wiki was but after he gave me the quick notes version of how we could use it we were on our way. And true to form for the Creative Commons video it really was as simple as "edit, write and save." We completed and presented our entire project using the wiki.

I didn't fully understand the potential of the wiki then, but did realize that it was a great tool. For this course I have expanded my knowledge of the wiki but still feel I have a far way to go to exploit the vast potential of this interactive and collaborative Web 2.0 tool.

Reflection on the Process of Learning about the Tool

To reacquaint myself with wikis I viewed many wikis through the trailfire for this week but more on that later. Both Richardson (2009) and Davies & Merchant (2009) spent a great deal of time using wikipedia as a model for all wikis. It is highly successful and demonstrates all of what a wiki can become once we lose the fear of vandalism, and let go of the authority for information as Davie & Merchant point out with the encyclopaedia example at the beginning of their writing on wikis. Using what I had read in these two articles as a starting point I went to Wikipedia to look up Union Bay which is the small town which I call home on Vancouver Island. There is an article for Union Bay and I compared the information that was there to a history of Union Bay book that I own and it was amazingly accurate. One of the knocks against Wikipedia has been that because it can be edited by anyone that it may not be accurate. In fact Davies and Merchant have titled their chapter on wikis "Wikis:The Death of the Author?" I think that may be correct on the level that there may no longer be one author for an article, but perhaps many who will write, edit and collaborate thanks to the medium of wikis. So really wikis can be considered the birth of many authors!

Another point I found repeated in the various readings I did on wikis was that of citizen journalism which brings about the discussion of the speed and ease of creating new information using wikis. The term wiki reportedly comes from the Hawaiin term wiki-wiki which means quickly (Hawaii 5-0 enthusiasts will remember Chin-ho saying this often!) mixed with the word encyclopedia giving us a quick encylopedia. Davies and Merchant use the example of the London bombings to illustrate just how quickly information can be put on to Wikipedia through mobile devices such as cell phones. The first article appeared less than 2 hours after the attack and there have been over three thousand revisions since that time. Both numbers are impressive, the speed deomstrates the immediacy of this medium and the number of revisions demonstates what multiple authors can contribute.

As part of learning about wikis I created a wiki and posted its address to our class discussion for anyone who wanted to look at and contribute to it...at the time of this writing Tom took me up on the offer and wrote comments on the wiki. In cretaing the wiki I just registered with zoho.com for a free wiki site and then editted the wiki. It was a simple process. As with many web 2.0 sites I was encouraged to add tags to my wiki which I did. On the right side column of the wiki it at first said that I had no tags and that I should add them to make my wiki more easily found, however it took me a while to figure out thta the + sign near the edit button was where the tags were to be added. Other parts of the swetup were much easier. I used the templates that they supplied and found them very easy to use. I added a second page to further work with the wiki and this worked well including automatically linking it as a subpage to the home page. Having built websites using HTML I find the easse of wikis a thing of beauty, although I do feel a loss of control as things such as page layout and fonts are preset for me. I feel confident in the basics of wikis and feel that I can use them both personally and professionally in the future.

The Tool and My Own Personal Learning

The main use I see for my personal learning is collaboration. When a project requires collaboration I will immediately suggest a wiki instead of using email to coordinate tasks on a project and contributions by the various members of a group. I think that wikis can replace emails for these types of projects because not only can I share information about the project, but I can also create the project using wiki software. Wikis simplify the process by posting the information once for the whole group to see compared to emails which need to be opened and refered back to often multiple times to share the same information with colleagues.

The Tool and Teaching and Learning

There is limitless potential for wikis to be used in educational settings. In all area of the curriculum wikis have a place. I currently have a homework page for math, but I am considering creating a wiki to link lessons, review, homework and real life applications of mathematics together. This could alos be a place where students are able to support one another in their learning by asking and answering questions reagrding their work.
I have created a Flickr page for my yearbook and we treat it somewhat as a wiki to share the photographs and fundamentally it is based on the wiki premise that everyone is the editor in chief and evreyone can make a contribution. I will look further into creatinga wiki for the yearbook as well as the Flickr page.

One of the keypoints that I got from Vicki Davis in her Cool Cat Teacher Wiki was to begin slowly and build the wikis carefully. I feel that this week has sparked the interest in wikis and that I need to look at the goals for my students and how to achieve them using wikis...