Wiki in Education

More and more Wikis are being used in educational settings. Today’s economy has evolved from a mechanical economy to a system of connections economy. Because of that, students will need to have earned skills in a collaborative and creative project-based work and to have developed analytical, thoughtful practices. Wikis are an ideal tool for guiding students achieve these skills.

Wikis can be a challenge for IT to control. Because everyone is putting in data, you end up in a mess. Wikis can be a challenge for users to learn. Even though it is quite easy to create wikis, it is not always so simple for users to take advantage of them. So for nontech workers, using wikis does require upfront training. Despite wikis' rough user interfaces, it took me just a couple of hours of training to get started with them. Wikis help distribute information, not control projects. Although wikis aid in project management, they do not actually give tools for project management. It is important to think through the information structure that your wiki will use before you start it. Everyone must be on the same page in creating the criteria used to arrange information. Wikis are not safe. Even where IT uses wikis wisely, there is an underlying risk to having project information kept on wikis. So wikis are not appropriate for editing sensitive documents.

Why you should still use wikis despite their issues? Although wikis are not perfect, they do have powerful advantages. Foremost is the fact that documents are edited in a very visible way, which adds responsibility. Members of a team have to support the changes because everybody can see it. A technical advantage of wikis over other document management tools is that there are plenty of good open source versions available at little or even free. Plus such wikis are usually extensible, so you can customize them to your needs. Yet you do not need an expert administrator or extra hardware resources.