Using Moodle

Effective Wiki Practices

Wikis are gaining popularity as a collaborative tool in many environments. There are now several commercial vendors offering wikis for group collaboration in corporate settings. Many social web sites also have wikis to allow their members to collaborate on documents. Effective management practices are the key to a wiki’s success. You’ll need to think about your wiki’s editorial policy, as well as its educational objectives.

Wiki Basics

Wikis are a simple, flexible tool for collaboration. They can be used for everything from simple lists of web links to building entire encyclopedias. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) is the largest wiki in the world. As of September 2004, Wikipedia contained 358,000 articles on everything from general topology to split infinitives. The entire Wikipedia is written by volunteers from around the world. An article is started by someone with an interest in the subject, and then anyone in the community can add content, edit other people’s work, or add another page elaborating on a sub-topic. It has become so large and so frequently used that there is a lively debate about how authoritative a collaborative work without a central editor can be.

Of course, wikis in your own class probably won’t be that extensive. But it’s important to have a plan for your wiki before you release it to the class. Students need to know the purpose of the wiki and how it fits in with the class. If it’s a personal wiki, will they be graded? Is it simply ...