Why+wiki?

The Wiki Experience
What's the big deal about wikis? Why are they used in education? What can they be used to accomplish? Click on the following links for answers to these questions and more!

10 Best Practices for Educational Wikis

=Benefits of Using Wikis in the Classroom= Using a wiki in the classroom gives students the opportunity to author in a collaborative environment. The benefits of collaborative authoring include: Retrieved from []
 * Facilitates Collaborative Authoring**
 * //Learning from others.// Collaborative authoring allows students to learn from one another – both in terms of viewing each other’s content but also by seeing the quality of other students’ work. In a traditional classroom, a student writes a paper, the teacher grades it, and then returns it to the student. Other students rarely have the opportunity to see and therefore learn from the information in that paper. Seeing other students’ work on a continuous basis can cause a student to evaluate his or her own work and see how it compares in quality. The comparison may cause the student to raise his or her work to a higher level.
 * //Developing a higher level of critical thinking.// Students can develop critical thinking skills by critiquing other students’ information and learning how to defend their views when critiqued by other students.
 * //Deepening investigative skills.// Working collaboratively on one document can encourage a student to do more investigative work. When information is critiqued as incorrect or underdeveloped, the author is encouraged to do additional research to respond to the critiques.
 * //Developing skills for negotiating conflict and facilitating effective teamwork.// Professors at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi found that working on a wiki helps co-authors negotiate conflict. In Wiki As a Collaborative Writing Tool, they write that “conflict … is an inherent part of the collaborative process…Wikis provide a means to negotiate conflict and to build upon the positive aspects of conflict. In writing and working collaboratively with wikis, users must create and agree on the structures, forms, and methods that are necessary to accomplish their collaborative task….[The] required negotiation of space can lead to a better understanding of the social processes that underlie any collaborative activity. In these ways, wikis not only build constructive communities of writers, but also accommodate differences among members of these communities, which in turn can allow all voices to contribute to the conversation.”
 * //Building a class community.// Working together in a collaborative process helps class members meet one another and build mutually beneficial scholarly relationships.