Week No. 5: Web 2.0.Wikis

In our ICTs in ELT , our facilitator, Professor Evelyn Izquierdo, explained us what a Wiki is and we were assigned a task that consists of developing our personal wiki projects.Mine has to do with the integration of my teaching activities at Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez with blogging as an alternative strategy to make the teaching-learning process more effective, participative, cooperative and interesting.In addition, I would like to present the following important information related to wiki websites.

A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.

Ward Cunningham, who was the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work. "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word for "fast".

Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A
wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment.

Duffy and Bruns (2006) list several possible educational uses of wikis:

• Students can use a wiki to develop research projects, with the wiki serving as ongoing
documentation of their work.

• Students can add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, building a
collaborative annotated bibliography on a wiki.

• A wiki can be used for publishing course resources like syllabi and handouts, and students
can edit and comment on these directly for all to see.

• Teachers can use wikis as a knowledge base, enabling them to share reflections and
thoughts regarding teaching practices, and allowing for versioning and documentation.

• Wikis can be used to map concepts. They are useful for brainstorming, and editing a
given wiki topic can produce a linked network of resources.

• A wiki can be used as a presentation tool in place of conventional software, and students
are able to directly comment on and revise the presentation content. Parker & Chao61 .

• Wikis are tools for group authoring. Often group members collaborate on a document by
emailing to each member of the group a file that each person edits on their computer, and
some attempt is then made to coordinate the edits so that everyone’s work is equally represented;using a wiki pulls the group members together and enables them to build and
edit the document on a single, central wiki page.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki.

http://enijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3po57-072Parker284.pdf