How to get around with wikis in teaching

Abstract

Wikis were showed to be an interesting and powerful tool in education, supporting tasks starting from project management, collaborative data management, etc., up to more elaborate tasks such as collaborative production of lecture notes, reports, and essays. On the other hand, most wiki softwares were not created as educational tools in the first place, hence their application in curricula with groups of students faces some obstacles which need to be dealt with. These include motivating the students to engage with the tool, boosting collaboration between students, supervising and tracking student's activity, and evaluation. A number of tools were developed to enable or ease these tasks for the teacher. This paper takes a look on selected tools developed with this aim with two main goals: to produce a concise list of functionalities that are needed, and to compare and evaluate the tools that are available. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.