home

Welcome to turningonwiki! This wiki provides strategies for using a wiki for instruction, assessment, and virtual student collaboration.

media type="youtube" key="-dnL00TdmLY&rel=1" height="355" width="425"

Click [|here] to start your own free classroom wiki //without ads//!

History of Wikis
//From [|Wikipedia]//
 * //A **wiki** ([|IPA]: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː][|[1]]) is a [|website] that allows visitors to add, remove, [|edit] and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for [|linking] among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass [|collaborative authoring]. The term wiki also can refer to the [|collaborative software] itself ([|wiki engine]) that facilitates the operation of such a site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the [|computer science] site (the original wiki) [|WikiWikiWeb] and online encyclopedias such as [|Wikipedia].//
 * [|A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be “rolled back” if necessary.>]

The most famous of all wikis is, of course, the much-beleaguered Wikipedia. Whatever your take on Wikipedia might be, consider the following examples:
 * [|Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation] :: Article found in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog regarding the use of Wikipedia as a valid research source: "For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia."
 * [|Albert Einstein and the Policing of Wikipedia]- a noted educational technologist talks about his experience with the reliability and editing capacity of Wikipedia.
 * [|Errors in Encyclopedia Brittanica]- how errors found in Brittanica are immediately fixable in Wikipedia.

Feel free to add to the discussion board post regarding the use of Wikipedia by students.

Hey Mike