Wikis

Wikis

A wiki is usually a web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in 
collaboration with others.

 It is generally used as a natural tool for distant education and not only, that enables instructors to create collaborative activities for their students. Students are able to present course and project information, add links, ask and answer each other’s questions. (Linda Scwarts et.al., 2004)  

Here you can go to this link and watch an interesting video bout wiki history http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFPW0r4jWk

Based on the classroom discussion and my personal experience of using wikis I found out some interesting, positive and negative sides of using wikis.

First of all, it is interesting to follow and continue someone’s idea. In this case students are obliged to read their peers’ work before writing something, so it can be very useful for practicing reading and writing.

Secondly, Students are learning new ideas from their classmates.

Finally, in general cases collaboration may highly occur and students sometimes can come up with the new topic out of the one that the teacher gave to them, which leads to raise their creativity very often.

While talking about wikis it is also worth talking about some things that I didn’t like.

As most of my classmates, I also think that it is not fair to edit someone’s work in wiki account i.e. delete pictures that he/she uploaded, change the sentences etc. because I suppose that the person spent time on searching the picture/link/video and also on coming up with some ideas that s/he wrote, so I would not let my students to do that in order not to be disappointed.

Besides, I think that the teacher should be very careful while signing up the assignment and take into consideration all the criteria of assessment (word count, content etc.) that assignment may need.

Finally, we are not guaranteed from technical problems that may occur while working with wikis. For example I had to write the content twice because first time I wrote, it sucked and didn’t save the content, so had to do the same work twice wasting my time.

In general, as teachers we should concern about our students’ need of using wikis in Armenia because it is not widely used tool in our schools and universities.

According to Linda Scwarts et.al., (2004), wikis are more often used by specific departments for specific information and discussion topics  than for  campus- wide uses.

So, we can suppose that anyway wikis can be a strong tool that  teachers might widely use.

As for me it is qwite difficult to say whether I am going to use wikis in my teaching or not because I need to explore more and find out more about them, but I hope that I will reflect on it  in my further reflections.