Wikis in ELT

A  Wiki?

Wiki is the name given by a programmer from Oregon, called Ward Cunningham in 1994 to his invention. This is a creation, Exchange and revision system on the web. This term comes from the Hawaiian “WikiWiki” that means “fast” and it has been adopted on the tech field to refer to creation of content in a collaborative way.

The most famous wiki in the world is the Wikipedia, which from 2001 gathers more than a million articles and users can modify its contents.  

You may use a WIKI if you want to:

-          Create pages in a fast and easy way.

-          It offers the users freedom.

-          It is easy to use so everybody can use it.

-          You may add text, documents, links, images, videos and so on.

 A Wiki used in ELT allows teachers and students to work together on building a course, adding content to the page and making students feel really involved in their own learning process. Students may create pages about what they like and want to share with their classmates. In Venezuela a wiki can be very useful to give extra material to the students without the need of printed materials or books that can be impossible to find or incredibly expensive.

Things to bear in mind:

-          To publish you only have to click the “edit” button and add or write want you want.

-          The content does not go under revision or approval of any kind. So this may represent a weakness in terms of the reliability of the information.

-      All the content goes Atribución 2.0 of Creative Commons license. This allows to publish, copy, distribute your work but with the required acknowledgement.

Wikis have become more and more popular and a very handy tool for teachers that want to advance with the new technologies applicable for teaching.

References: http://www.maestrosdelweb.com/editorial/queeswiki/ (2006)

Images taken from: http://ideasparalaclase.com/tag/wikis/

Click on the next link to watch a video on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvy7LgC4MXA