I’d like to talk to you about using a wiki. I’ve used a wiki and found it an excellent collaboration tool. It’s great to use with small groups of up to 6-8 to share, develop and explore new ideas but is not as effective with a whole class group because the whole group is too big for real collaboration to be effective.

You would use a wiki because all of the information is in one place. This is an advantage over other tools that you could choose to use for collaboration. You can see all the additions, the editing the new information and content on the one page when you open it. It also allows you to track the work history so that nothing can be lost. It’s asynchronous, which means that you can work on the wiki, whenever you feel like working on the wiki. At home, at night, Saturdays, you don’t need to be one line with somebody else to do the collaboration and you don’t need to be in a room with somebody else to do the collaboration.

It’s easy to use and to edit changes. You just have one click on familiar buttons like edit and save to access everything you need to work with. It can be a public or a private space because people are invited to be in a wiki.

This makes it particularly good if you are teachers in a faculty or a stage group wanting to work together on a program or a lesson planning exercise and you just have a group of people invited to your private wiki.

Student groups: it’s also private for them and safe for them to work as opposed to a public wiki where people from around the world could have access to the conversations and material.

A wiki is very useful for the following skills it develops. It encourages higher order thinking because participants are continually evaluating and synthesising information and ideas that is evolving in the wiki.

A wiki encourages discussion and metacognition. It encourages writing skills through constant revision of written work. It invites action by participants so it is an active not a passive tool. This is useful to have a look at student groups and group work and see who is actually contributing to the development of the wiki.

What happens to the published product, either when the wiki is at a stage where the participants feel that they want to publish the work in any form? Then they can do this. They can make the document public at any time as a webpage. They can copy it and paste it into a word document or they can print it.

I would strongly encourage everyone to have a look at a wiki. It is a really useful and productive exercise in collaborating with others.