Wikis and Writing

I recently read a post on the blog Digital Writing, Digital Teaching by Troy Hicks that talked about his trip to the NWP/NCTE 2008 conference.  What caught my eye in this blog post was the mention of wikis, which I actually had to do a project about for my ED 205 class that I took over the summer.  As Hicks says in one of his links (Writing with Wikis) from his post,

As we invite students to compose and collaborate in online spaces, wikis have emerged as a primary tool for writing. While wikis sometimes have a negative connotation in academic circles — any discussion of Wikipedia will assuredly bring out a range of emotions in teachers and researchers — the basic principles of wiki writing offers students many opportunities to draft, publish, and revise their work. Moreover, wikis provide opportunities for students to develop online communities, embed additional web-based media into their writing, and monitor their own work over time.

When I first started researching wikis myself for my ED 205 project, I really didn’t even know what they were.  I was only familiar with the term wiki as it related to Wikipedia.  So, I had to embark upon a quest to find out just what a wiki really was.  According to wiki.org, a wiki is

…a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. 

This means that anyone can add content to a wiki and anyone can edit what others have added to the wiki.  A wiki is therefore a collaborative web page built by many different users.  There are many different websites where people can go to start their own wikis, three of which are wetpaint, wikispaces, and pbwiki. 

This relates to writing in that wikis can be used in English classrooms for writing projects. Students working on a group writing project can post lists of tasks, peer edit each other’s work, give each other links to resources, and ask and answer questions.  Wikis can take a project that would otherwise be done through dozens of e-mails, and put it all in one place that is accessible to everyone in the group.  Hicks notes three different types of collaborative writing that wikis could be used for here, where he also includes a lot of interesting links about wikis.  His blog post also talks about a lot of different technology topics discussed at the conference as well that would be interesting to read for anyone who is interested in the topic.

Sources: 

San Antonio, Tech To Go, and Back to the Snow at Digital Writing, Digital Teaching by Taylor Hicks.

Writing with Wikis by Troy Hicks at aceworkshop. 

What is Wiki at wiki.org