Today I read a chapter that talks about what wikis are and the two different types of wikis that can be used. Wikis are websites that can be edited by a large number of people who do not need to know html code to edit them. Some wikis are very popular and get a lot of traffic which is both a good and bad thing. It's good to have a lot of traffic because you have a lot of people collaborating and you can even have experts add their information to the specific wiki so that everyone can benefit from it. But at the same time you can also have people post false information on wikis just because they have the power and freedom to do such a thing.
One type of wiki that people use is that of a public wiki. Public wikis would be websites such as wikipedia. These wikis use crowd sourcing on a large and public scale for people to communicate with each other. Public wikis are generally the ones that are more likely to have misinformation or misuse of the website occur on them. The second type of wiki is that of an enterprise wiki. These types of wikis are more restricted and have more of a management feature on them. These have much more restrictions on access, control, and the number of people who are allowed to participate on them.
As far as being able to use wikis in the classroom I think that they could be great tools to teach about how easy it is to find false information on a wikisite and on the web in general especially with older elementary school students. You also have the chance to use this tool inside of you classroom to help show the collaborative process and allow for people to see the process you went through to get to a decision. If you are not sure of the use of wikis you can find almost all of the features that you have on wikis available through googledocs or other google features. Don't limit your creativity as a teacher, because your creativity will be a spring board for your students.
*All of this information is a reflection to chapter 2 in the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie D. Sandifer
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