CALL Potpourri
Issue 9, Summer 2005
TELL @ ELI Archive

So what is a Wiki anyway? “Wiki” is Hawaiian for “quickly;” however, for Internet users, Wiki is “open knowledge bases which can be improved by anyone” (Media Wiki Developmet). Thus, it allows all users, even those with very limited technical skills, to quickly compose, co-author, or edit Wiki Web pages (for more information check the Wiki entry in the WikiPedia).

Educators perceive the Wikis to be a good tool for creating interactive activities, presenting content, and actively involving students in the learning process (Schwartz, Clark, Cossarin, Rudolph, 2004). In the ESL context, the Wikis can offer a great opportunity for shared writing, peer editing, and brainstorming. Furthermore, writing on the World Wide Web can be very motivating for students, as it creates an immeasurable environment of authentic readers.

For ESL classes, it means that you and your students can get involved in hypermedia authoring: the third computer-mediated communication (CMC) mode as identified by Warschauer (1999, 2004). While synchronous and asynchronous CMC have been actively employed in the ESL settings, hypermedia authoring has been used less frequently. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that it requires more technical skills, capabilities, and often the involvement of a third-party webmaster, thus making the CALL hypermedia authoring activities more difficult to design and implement. With Wiki technology, the above is not true anymore! You and your students can quickly create a website without the knowledge of HTML or other programming languages.

While one of the most popular Wiki sources on the Internet is Wikipedia, and ESL teachers have approached it as an information source, the Wiki hypermedia ‘genre’ is much more diverse. There are numerous Wiki sites on the Internet that allow multiple users to co-author pages. Here are some examples:
_____1. Wiki page on Culture Shock
_____2. Wiki site on Travel
_____3. Wiki Books on various topics – from cooking to American history

The fact that the Wiki can be improved by “anyone,” should be a caveat to users. “Mainstream” Wikis might be too dynamic and difficult for teachers to control since everybody, including people who do not participate in the class can post, edit, create hyperlinks to and from the class project page. However, there are Wiki sites, such as Seedwiki, that provide the opportunity to create “private” Wikis to which only participants who know the specific Wiki name or have the direct Wiki URL can post.

SeedWiki is a site that allows the creation of private accounts on which users can upload multiple types of files, track the changes that are made to the pages, create, co-author, share texts, and accompany them with images. The use of this site is free, and it allows the creation of a virtually infinite number of pages. In fact, SeedWiki has text windows with icons and friendly tools similar to what we are used to when working with MS Word.

The benefits of Wiki hypermedia authoring go beyond providing a shared writing space and opportunities for easy web publishing. Teachers may also use the Wiki experiences of their students in order to draw their attention to and raise their understanding of the dynamic nature of web texts and strategies for identifying reliable information on the web.

There is an old Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” Consequently we decided to involve you, our readers, in a Wiki experience: we created a collaborative space on Seedwiki, where we started the process of creating a writing project outline. Please visit our Wiki to follow the flow of the page creation by viewing the different versions of the project outline and to co-author the project with us. You are welcome to provide your feedback, or directly change the text incorporating your own ideas: just use the corresponding links on the left-hand side of the page. To get to our writing project Wiki page, you can either go to www.seedwiki.com and search for “Welcome to Wiki”, or click on this link which will take you directly to the page.

Schwartz, L., Clark, S., Cossarin, M., Rudolph, J. (April, 2004). Educational Wikis: features and selection criteria. In International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Retrieved on June 29, 2005 form:
http://www.irrodl.org/content/v5.1/technote_xxvii.html

Warschauer, M. (1999). Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education. Mahwah, New Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and writing. In C. Davidson and J. Cummins (Eds.), Handbook of English Language Teaching. Kluwer: Dordrecht, Netherlands. Retrieved on November 15, 2004 from: http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/technology.pdf.