Wikis can be used to share dialogue and information among participants in group projects, or to allow learners to engage in learning with each other, using wikis as a collaborative environment to construct their knowledge or to be part of a virtual community of practice. Wikis show the evolution of thought processes as students interact with the site and its contents.
As users can modify the content of a wiki, allowing such manipulation carries some risks. Thus wikis are often monitored to ensure that inappropriate language or content are not allowed; however, this can be time-consuming.
How to do it
There are many different wiki creating and hosting services available. Wikimatrix provides a comparison of the key features offered by a variety of services. There are also plenty of other non-wiki collaborative editing tools such as googledocs. Most wiki-hosting services have a built-in search system for you to find wikis of interest, and there are some general wiki-search engines such as wikiindex.
Incorporating wikis
- To create multimedia presentations and simple digital stories as they are able to incorporate sounds, movies and pictures
- As e-portfolios illustrating their utility as a tool for collection and reflection of current thoughts
- To form groups around specific topics and might also prove to be an ideal vehicle for soliciting ongoing input for research or projects where community input can help inform and direct subsequent investigation
- As repositories for meeting notes. Agenda items are contributed prior to a meeting; notes added during the meeting are saved in a public archive
Considerations
In an open and collaborative web environment, anyone can very easily post copyrighted material without the permission of copyright holders (e.g. patient anonymity when clinical data and images are posted), post otherwise unsuitable or misleading content
A lack of clear and complete authorship/editorship information attached to each wiki entry, including authors’/editors’ affiliations and credentials, is a serious quality issue. Wiki author anonymity also poses questions for higher education institutions where assessment and grading are still typically based on individual efforts
Wikis are sometimes prone to vandalism and, as a result, to serious quality issues, because of their free form nature and the (relative/potential) lack of control over their content (e.g. edit in a way that reduces its accuracy, or even delete a good wiki entry)
Wikis do not have the functionality expected on more traditional web sites, such as the use of highly visual dynamic backgrounds that are integrated with various multimedia. However, they are highly useful pedagogically as a low technology approach to providing an online presence with the ability to have links to other online resources or to store a variety of files
Solutions
Monitoring and moderation: Wiki software packages have built-in ‘Administrator’s functionalities’ to support monitoring and moderation. However, these tasks can be very time-consuming and may prove to be too great a challenge to ask of educators who already lack time and resources
The ‘closed environment’ scenario: e.g. Learning Central – The wiki owner(s) /Administrator(s), enforce, check, and limit wiki and blog registration and editing privileges to selected, well-defined, and verifiable special interest groups or communities of users. Everyone else will still be able to access/read the wiki and, if desirable to also post limited (moderated) comments (to build a community)
Obtaining Patient Permission: Permission must be sought when posting clinical photos/videos, and all efforts should be made to preserve individuals’ privacy. Clinical wikis may also be password protected if necessary to further preserve patient confidentiality. The software also makes it a simple matter for an editor to delete/revert or modify material that violates patient privacy. Refer to patient consent and copyright policies
