Wikis are simple websites that are shared by multiple users. If you have no previous experience with wikis, I highly suggest this YouTube video that covers the basics of wikis in simple, easy to understand language.
Wikis are incredibly useful in an educational setting. They can be used to post course materials, facilitate group projects, and even act as a CMS (see my last post to learn more about CMS). To start, I suggest everyone watch the following video which will walk you through setting up your own educational wiki. The narration is dry, but it is an incredibly useful tutorial.
One tool mentioned in the above video that did not receive much attention is student collaboration via wiki. Now, the video suggests that the way to accomplish collaboration is to have students upload a word processing document and update that after each change is made. Unfortunately, that method can cause some problems. If two students make changes to the same version and upload them one after another, the changes made by the first would be lost.
My suggestion is to have students create their own group wiki for their project. That way they can create pages for different pieces of the project: one for an information outline, one for resources, even one for division of responsibilities. Only one person can edit the wiki at the time, so changes will not be lost.
As a quick final note, I wanted to expand upon my earlier suggestion that you use a wiki for you course management. If you are interested in using a wiki as your CMS, please check out Moodle. Moodle is a free, open source wiki-based CMS. I have used it, and it is incredibly simple and easy to use.
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