We all know that the resources and tools available on the Internet are transforming the way we think, learn and teach. Certainly access to information is enormous, but many online tools today encourage and support interaction, creativity and collaboration. Wiki purposes:

• To share your knowledge, experiences and questions
• To share your ideas and best practices
• To generate ideas for trying new modalities in your own teaching and learning
• To understand and use some online tools and improve your own personal use of technology

So what is a wiki?

Wiki is a Hawaian term meaning, fast. Wiki has come to mean a collaborative website.

It is an online tool that “enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple markup language using a web browser” and “allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages.”

- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Wikipedia is the most well-known wiki. It is an online “encyclopedia” that is maintained and updated by “YOU”

“Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages. As of today, there are 2,212,073 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”

The best way to understand the potential of a wiki is to watch the Common Craft “Wiki’s in Plain English” video. If you plan to develop a wiki for a class, colleague collaboration or a family trip, I highly recommend sharing this video:

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

Wiki software is available for faculty on BlackBoard, but students and teachers can check out the free sites below. I have had success with www.pbwiki.com and they are really trying to meet the needs of the education community.

www.pbwiki.com

www.wetpaint.com

www.wikispaces.com