Literature on Wikis

This literature is complied from several sources.

New Literacies Instruction in Teacher Education

Literacy is defined as a relative, rather than absolute, range of knowledge and skills for reading, writing, communicating and critical thinking (International Literacy Institute, 2002, p. 9).

According to the Partnership of 21st Century Skills, new literacy is the ability to use ICTs to develop 21st century content knowledge and skills critical for success in the workplace and in life. The new literacy is an additional set of basic skills essential for surviving in a digital networked environment

New literacies encompass several types of literacies:
• Technology literacy: The ability to use the Internet to access and communicate information.
• Information literacy: The ability to research and analyze information to make valid decisions.
• Media literacy: The ability to produce, distribute and evaluate audio/video content.
• Global literacy: The understanding of the interdependence of people all over the
world and the ability to participate in global interactions and collaboration.
• Social competence and responsibility literacy: An awareness of the need for safety and privacy associated with uses of the Internet
https://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

According to Ward Cunningham, originator of the wiki paradigm, a wiki is "the simplest online database that could possibly work." [1] This statement expresses one of the goals of the wiki paradigm, which is to provide user interface functionality in the simplest way possible. The benefit of simplicity in our case is that users can master system functionality quickly, and focus their energies on the collaborative development of content.


In 1999, the World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked back on the previous decade and lamented: "I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying “interactive,” and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was “interactive,” meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity.

Features that are unique to a wiki…
• Anyone can change anything. Wikis are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined. Authoring software, permissions, or passwords are typically not required.
• Wikis use simplified hypertext markup. Wikis have their own markup language that essentially strips HTML down to its simplest elements. Raw URLs typically require no markup tags at all to be rendered live on a wiki page.
• WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Linking to related pages is easy, which promotes promiscuous interlinking among wiki pages.
• What’s unique about wikis is that users define for themselves how their processes and groups will develop, usually by making things up as they go along.


• links wikis into its course management system authoring environment so that design teams can quickly and collaboratively build reference lists and outlines, brainstorm instructional strategies, and capture suggestions.
• store and organize content for a major new job posting and career development Web site that it is developing.
• the users decided for themselves how the wiki would fulfill their objectives. Technical support and training was minimal: at most, one hour of instruction was needed, and in most cases, orientation was handled by a single e-mail.
• Whereas "hard security" functions by restricting access or hiding pages, wikis save copies of successively edited versions; thus, work that has been deleted or defaced can be recovered with a couple clicks of the mouse.
• In addition to fostering the development of writing skills as they are already understood, wikis may prove to be invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies.
• an instructor could structure and regulate interaction to such an extent that the wiki is effectively transformed into a stripped-down course management system. But doing so risks diluting the special qualities that make wikis worth using in the first place, with the result being, in the words of Heather James, "pumped-up PowerPoint."
• This particular challenge bears resemblance to the one posed by constructivist teaching philosophy. To truly empower students within collaborative or coconstructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities.
• . It’s not that authority can’t be imposed on a wiki, but doing so undermines the effectivene
http://ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html


Wikis can be used to facilitate computer supported collaborative learning, CSCL. CSCL, first noted in the early 1990s, is the development of collaboration by means of technology to augment education and research. CSCL promotes peer interaction and facilitates the sharing and distribution of knowledge and expertise amongst a group of learners (Lipponen, 2002). Collaborative learning exercises are student centred and enable students to share authority and empower themselves with the responsibility of building on their foundational knowledge (Myers, 1991). Students can use wikis to create a set of documents that reflect the shared knowledge of the learning group. Wikis can also be used to facilitate the dissemination of information, to enable the exchange of ideas and to facilitate group interaction.


Extending the Wiki Paradigm for Use in the Classroom
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu:2047/iel5/9035/28682/01286462.pdf?isnumber=28682&prod=CNF&arnumber=1286462&arSt=+255&ared=+259+Vol.1&arAuthor=Chien-min+Wang%3B+Turner%2C+D.

Wiki collaboration systems encourage student-centered learning environments, because they encourage students to be co-creators of course content. There area few properties of traditional wiki systems that are not desirable in the context of the classroom:
• all content is modifiable by any user,
• all content is public, There is a danger of publishing inappropriate or private information. It is quite easy to link from a blog dashboard to other blogs that may deal with inappropriate or indecent topics. The freedom to publish carries the responsibility of ethical and socially appropriate uses of web publication.
• simultaneous edits are allowed but not successful,
• and the wiki is forever evolving. -
• the most common objection to wikis is the typical absence of an explicit organizing structure.
• anybody can spot a wiki page from "a mile away," any wikis tend toward plainness, but there’s no reason that more pleasing fonts, colors, and layouts can’t be accommodated through the judicious application of Cascading Style Sheets
• In the context of the classroom, these properties are not always desirable.


http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/

One person wiki
They can map concepts; wikis are extremely useful for brainstorming. Exploring a topic by means of a wikiweb is a curiously comfortable feeling, and often very rewarding. Authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of web pages roughly analogous to a concept map, a visual technique for representing knowledge and information. More can be read about concept mapping in Novak's online introduction

Nonetheless, a single user wiki is a marvellous way of collecting and presenting information over a period of time.