Chapter 4 Summanry

Andrew Thonstad
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Chapter 4: Wikis: Easy Collaboration for All Wiki? What is a wiki? The word wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian wiki-wiki, which means “quick.” It was created as an easy authoring tool to assist people in publishing to the web. This website allows anyone to add, edit or delete any information anytime they want. Probably the best known wiki is Wikipedia.org. This encyclopedia is attempting to store the “sum of human knowledge.” Today there are over 3,062,190 articles in English on Wikipedia. To add to that, they have numerous over wiki___ sites (wikinews, wikispecies, wikibooks, etc).
I agree with the book about the first time I came across Wikipedia – I was skeptical. It did not seem like a legitimate source for information. A lot has changed since then. It has become a respected source for researching information.
Another plus for wikis is that while they are easy to modify, they are easy to fix if a person (or people) add information that is incorrect or inappropriate.

There are many different uses for wikis. Large corporations are using them to manage information and documents; schools and universities are using them to share information (South Africa has their whole curriculum on a wiki); project teams are using them to keep track of their work; teachers are using them as a resource for their students (like this class).

Wikis in schools
Students have been using Wikipedia as a resource for many years. Due to the ability of anyone to edit information, the information found on Wikipedia can be (and usually is) the most up-to-date research and information available. The chapter lists a number of good wikis by educators to review. The author goes into detail on building your own wiki site. He also lists a number of wiki tools and resources that can be used to enhance your wiki.
How will I use Wikis in my classroom? I am not quite sure yet. I like the idea of using a wiki to keep a paperless classroom for handouts, assignments, and other important information. But beyond that, I am going to have to continue to play around with my new wiki. Now I have the power to rewrite history!!!!!