What are wikis?
Why might I want to create them (or have students create them)?
How might I use them in my courses?

You can find answers to these questions in a variety of places, including

• Teaching with Wikis at the University of Minnesota
• the wiki page on the CUNY Academic wiki that explains Educational Wikis in general
• a brief PowerPoint Presentation (that Karen Greenberg created)  [Gina: this is an incomplete draft that I linked just to see how it would play in a wiki in page.]
• a wiki that explains and describes the “Current and Potential Uses of Wikis in the Teaching of Writing
• a site that explains “How to Use Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools“

What are some examples of these uses?

The Romantic Audience Project at Bowdoin:   This wiki is a collaborative study of poems, poets, and topics related to Romantic literature. The students chose the wiki framework because “this collaboration, [by] dynamically and unpredictably highlighting certain terms as representative of communal interest, is of particular interest in a study of Romanticism. . . The interesting ways in which the software itself provides order from apparent disorder, via linking patterns and other contextualizing elements, prompted insight into the process of the research. For instance, posting tendencies emerged that were worthwhile pondering as a class and could be framed as the expression of this group of students. This discussion attracted elaboration; this poem went unlinked; this author attracted biographical elaboration; this entry was cited often by other entries; etc.”

Wikis in the World Language Classroom: Transforming Teaching, Learning, & Teacher Preparation with Technology:  This paper describes (and illustrates) wikis as “tools for developing literacies that initiate, implement, and sustain transformative educational and social change in preservice language teachers,  language methods courses, and language teacher preparation programs.”