Wikis as a collaborative Tool

Using Wikis to quickly and simply create shared websites

Friday's Lunch and Learn session in SDU (a 1 hour session where lunch was served, information provided, and questions answered), was all about Wikis!

What are Wikis? Essentially they are a set of web pages which can be quickly and easily edited through a web-browser. A Wiki is a piece of software, where the main feature of is an "edit" link or button on the web pages, which gives you a simple editing panel enabling you to add content without needing to know any web languages. More

Wiki is a bit of an odd looking term, but in fact it is the Hawaiian word for "Quick"! The creator of Wikis Ward Cunningham, was inspired by the Wiki Wiki (Quick Quick) busses at the airport in Hawaii. And what better term for software that allows you to quickly edit web pages, than Wiki!

Most of us are familiar with Wiki's because of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedic website that is as commonly used as Google.


Wikis enable more than one person to edit the content on a page, quickly and easily. This enables the content to have been placed by many different authors, of varying expertise, where information that one person doesn't know is added by someone else, so that the document is cohesive, and as extensive as possible.

Wikis are really useful for collaborative activities, which fits well in the educational environment. Some activities that a Wiki could be used for are:
Brainstorming/Mind Mapping; for Collaborative Document Creation; Group Projects; Event Planning; Meeting management; Lists; Simple Websites; Shared Web resources…… there are many possibilities.

Within the session we looked at many examples of Wikis, and at exactly how easy it is to edit a Wiki page. A handout was given at the end of the session and can be found here: http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=wikis