The Free and Easy Way to Get Started With Wikis
The 2nd of
a Multi-Part Series on Emerging Technologies
by Robert Baird, Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies
Coordinator of Instructional Development, CITES EdTech
Not sure
how to create a wiki (or not even sure what a wiki is)?
If you're a novice to the world of
wikis, this article provides basic information about
wikis and shows how getting started is easy, fun, (and free)!
Wikis - Expanding the Knowledge-Base of the Web
Wikis are web pages that are designed for perpetual revision. They combine the familiar conventions of word processing with the ubiquity of the web and the collaboration potential of white boards. What is seemingly radical about wikis is that they can be set up so that anyone (in the world) can contribute and revise the text. The most well-known wiki is Wikipedia, now called the largest encyclopedia in the world. To quote from Wikipedia:
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing
most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser.
The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written
Nupedia and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has more than 3,210,000 articles, including more than 950,000 in the English-language version, and as of January 2006 it has more than 863,000 registered users.
There are over 200 language editions of Wikipedia
and the growth of Wikipedia has been phenomenal. The timeliness
and power of Wikipedia and wikis in general, however, can be seen
in the fact that Wikipedia is likely the only "encyclopedia" in
the world to have an
extensive entry devoted to self-criticism. However, accompanying
the success of Wikipedia has been numerous critiques aimed at the
legitimacy and reliability of Wikipedia as a credible reference
tool. As with any reference tool, researchers should not rely solely
on a single source, but should cross-reference important facts
and strive for a broader view of any issue. One area where Wikipedia
beats nearly all reference sources is in timeliness; for
instance, as Hurricane Katrina developed, Wikipedia was able to
offer an extensive entry that provided links to many other important
stories and resources detailing that tragedy.
Wiki Working Window
Using Peanut
Butter (PB) Wiki is a good place to start to create your first wiki. Like Blogger, PB Wiki is very easy to
use and offers excellent
instructions on getting started. To create a wiki, first select a name for your wiki, enter an email address so that you
can get your initial password, and then click "Make
a wiki."
To contribute to a PB Wiki everyone must use
a password. The owners of the PB Wiki decide whether the entire
world can see the wiki or if the wiki will remain private.
Once inside PB Wiki,
you can visit a web page and edit the page if you wish by clicking the "Edit This Page" button.
In each page, you can create a new sub page by putting brackets around a new heading. For example, say you want to create a new page
for "Links
and Further References" on your wiki home page. Just place
brackets [] around the words you want to use for you new sub page,
like so:
[Links
and Further References]
Once you save the changes, those brackets
tell PB Wiki to make a new sub page that you can then work with.
Wikis - Moving Us into the Future
There
is no longer any doubt that wikis, like email and word
processing before them, are new technologies that are here to stay.
What is not yet clear is how teachers and students will ultimately
choose to use these emerging technologies. What is clear, however,
is that teachers will be able to make better decisions about how
they use wikis in the classroom if they have first tested
out and experimented with these emerging technologies.
|
