First Impressions: Wikis

While wikis do provide the opportunity for joint creation with multiple collaborators, I found the site we utilized (PBworks) to be less user-friendly than other web 2.0 tools I've used. Other than collating links to our individual pages together in one space, I didn't see how the use of the wiki differed from having individual blogs for students. Also, while we will learn how to co-edit a page on a future project, I didn't really get to see how to use wikis effectively for multiple contributors, such as a class of 25 students. It seemed like it would be very time-consuming and tedious to keep track of different students' contributions, edits, and efforts. I would be more much willing to utilize this tool if it had a "track changes" format similar to that of Microsoft Word where you can see all of the changes made by different contributors. The prospect of having to click on multiple different archived versions of the same page and then look for changes between versions seemed daunting.

In my future classroom, I see wikis being best utilized as a review tool for exams or projects. For example, students could post questions on a wiki so I could see all of their questions on one page, as opposed to paging through different threads on a discussion board. Students could also use this space to respond to one another with answers. I also think that wikis could be used in my classroom for group projects, where students would be placed into small groups to create and post a project

If I do choose to utilize wikis in the future, I would look further into how to track different students' contributions and how to find a program that is more user-friendly than PBworks. I'm not sold yet on their utility over other web 2.0 tools, but I can see the potential.