08 October 2013

The Simplicity of Wikis – how they work

 

 

 

 

 
Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet and are therefore widely used in various sectors and levels of education. With its idea of a potentially collective, democratic, open, and dynamic design of knowledge creation wikis enhance collaborative learning.



The European Project WikiSkills
...provides opportunities for meaningful collaborative learning activities;
...promotes digital literacy, as well as social skills, writing skills and critical thinking;
...develops a sustainable virtual community of practice among the different project countries;
...enables educational communities to contribute to the actual information society;
...empowers civic behaviours, social inclusion, employability and cultural understanding.

 

 

 

There is one simple button that is the core of a wiki: the edit button!

 
 
In every wiki - just click on it and see what happens! Edit things and then just click save. And that's it! Like emails or blogs, wikis are very simple to use.

 

A wiki enables online-group collaboration and asynchronous collaboration


With wikis a group of people can collectively edit text. This text can be viewed and also changed by anyone who wants to contribute and has something to say about a particular matter.

Everybody knows Wikipedia, but wikis are not only for encyclopaedias. Wikis go beyond that!

 

Wikis can be used for many different purposes


Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note-taking.

1. Co-authoring

› Technical documentation

› Q&A

› Grant requests

2. Meetings

› Defining agenda

› Recording participant names

› Writing reports

3. Brainstorming & community of practice

› Gathering and publishing of good practices

› Discussions

4. Project management

› Listing tasks

› Completion status

 

A number of wiki platforms are available – MediaWiki, DokuWiki, XWiki to name a few – and each wiki platform supports a slightly different bundle of features to support collaboration.
 
You want to learn more about wikis? Go to www.wikiskills.net

 

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