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Wikis: One More Great Tool
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Diana Booth explains how effective use of wikis creates an authentic context for communication and encourages student participation. See Chad Low's Out of the Box article, "Carnival Laughter as an Antidote for Students' Fear and Anxiety," Essential Teacher, October 2009.
Do you know of a tool that helps students do the following?
I am sure you do, for there are plenty of them. We all have tricks up our sleeves—those wonderful activities that we have learned about either from a graduate professor, a peer, a book, a conference presenter, or our own experience. I do not know what tool(s) you thought of, but if you have not thought of wikis, then you have a chance to add something to your box of tricks.
A Little Bit of History
I learned about wikis at a technology conference in Utah in the summer of 2008. When I came home, I also attended a workshop on wikis. After that, it was easy to create my own wiki, which I started using right away. My students loved it, and I enjoyed seeing them more engaged and having fun while learning.
I also did a little research to learn how wikis started. According to Merriam-Webster (2009), a wiki is "a Web site that allows visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections." And I found out on Wikipedia that the first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1994 to help programmers exchange ideas easier and faster. Faster is a key word here because wiki is Hawaiian for "fast" (WikiWikiWeb, 2009).
Why Bother?
To persuade you that wikis are worthy of your attention, I highlight here some of their possible uses:
Instructor Uses
Student Uses
Class or Individual Activities
Group Activities
Understanding the Nature of a Wiki
Before you create your own wiki, I'd like to help you understand the nature of a wiki, which is very easy to do—just remember Wikipedia, the classic example of a wiki. Wikipedia has the following functions:
When you create your own wiki, it will have all of these same functions—except you are the administrator, which changes things slightly:
Creating a Wiki
To create your own wiki, you need to go to a wiki farm, which is a Web site that allows you to do just that. The most popular wiki farms are PBworks, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Wikia. To see more, you can do an online search for "wiki farms." Or you can check out Wikipedia's basic comparison of the known wiki farms (Comparison of Wiki Farms, 2009).
I've been using PBworks (formally PBwiki), which is a commercial wiki farm that offers basic features for free and advanced features for a fee. I have been quite happy with PBworks because it makes it extremely easy to create and use your own wiki. Also, I use it for free, there is no advertising, and the company keeps improving its wikis and providing excellent customer service.
To create a wiki with PBworks, follow these steps:
1. Go to http://pbworks.com/.
2. Click on Get Started.
3. Choose Educational.
4. Click on Try it Now!
5. Select Basic.
6. Fill out the required fields.
What’s Next?
What you do next will depend on your class, goals, students, and imagination. You can have one page or different pages (or even folders) for several groups or individual students. You can display a calendar; upload presentations, handouts, video, and audio; post links to other Web sites; and so on and so forth. The choice is almost unlimited.
The first semester I used a wiki, I didn't do anything fancy. We had only one front page, and the students in my high-intermediate ESL class were simply using it to post sentences with vocabulary words (from the Academic Word List). This was an extra-credit activity, but it was very popular. The students agreed to make the page visible to the public, but only they had permission to edit it.
The day I introduced this wiki to the ESL students, a comment appeared in the discussion area: "This is great!" Though the activity was not mandatory, all 30 words that we had studied in class were posted on the wiki in the sentences that students obtained from native English speakers. When we already had most of the words posted, another student commented: "Wow!!! We have many!"
Through these comments as well as in-class discussions, I learned that students were really enjoying this activity. They felt that they were learning the words better, and they felt good about their learning because they clearly saw how much they were adding to their knowledge of English.
In another class (an advanced grammar class in an intensive English program), students were making presentations on a selected structure. As part of their assignment, they had to summarize their presentation or upload the Microsoft PowerPoint presentation they had used in class. The goal was to reinforce their knowledge and to provide their classmates with an easy reference. This time, every student/group had its own page or folder.
If you are still not sure that there is a place for wikis in your classroom, you can always look at how other educators have used them. A wealth of them are available for public view at Public PBwikis.
Available Support
It is helpful to remember that if you start using wikis, you are never alone. There is a great deal of support available. The following are just a few sources of that support:
To Use or Not to Use
Of course, you do not need to start using wikis. There are other wonderful tools available. These days, many schools use such products as Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. Also, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have found their way into classrooms. The advantage of wikis is that they offer most of the functions of this technology, but also much more. For example, if you want students to practice peer review, Twitter would not be your first choice because every message must be no more than 140 characters in length. Platforms such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn require students to download their papers as attachments in the Discussion area, download their peers' papers onto their computers, know how to use the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word, and then download the marked-up versions of papers. The process can be quite cumbersome, time-consuming, and frustrating. And blogs do not allow for making changes to the text posted by others. All you can do is write your comment in a thread. In contrast, peer editing on a wiki is fast, easy, fun, and flexible in the face of various educational needs and contexts.
Wikis can make your classes more effective, engaging, and enjoyable for you and your students. Students will learn how to effectively collaborate with you and their classmates, spend more time on their assignments polishing their work before sharing it with others, and reach new depths in their knowledge. These are some of the reasons why hundreds of districts and universities, and hundreds of thousands of educators, have decided to begin using wikis.
References
Comparison of wiki farms. (2009). Retrieved September 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms
Merriam-Webster. (2009). Wiki. Retrieved September 21, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wiki
WikiWikiWeb. (2009). Retrieved September 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiwikiweb
Diana Booth (diana_booth@yahoo.com) is assistant director of ESL in the Adult Education Department at Triton College, in River Grove, Illinois, in the United States.
