Wiki+Description

As Adam Frey of Wikispaces often says, "Wikis are web pages with an edit button." It's a surprisingly crisp definition, even as it hides some of the complexity, and brilliance, of the technology. Invented by Ward Cunningham, wikis are a read/write web technology that allow for easy, fast, and collaborative websites to be built without the need for special software or a lot of training. Now, truth be told, wikis are a little harder to "grok" than your average word processor. If blogging is like walking on stilts, then using wikis is like riding a unicycle (OK, not that hard--but harder than blogging!). They are by far my favorite Web 2.0 tool, I should say, and are getting easier and easier to use as companies like Wikispaces and PBWiki (who both provide free wikis for K-12 education) come out with enhancements.
 * Wikis**:

What a wiki may lack in design sophistication, it makes up for in its sophisticated ability to allow multi-user publishing. Wikipedia (the user-editable encyclopedia) is an example of the highest use of a wiki, but you don't have to start there. First, if you like, a wiki can serve as an easy web-publishing tool without the inherent chronological structure of a blog. A wiki has the capacity to allow for the organization of data in either a hierarchical or hyperlink fashion, with no need for an expensive, web-publishing program. With the independence of being able to work from any computer with a connection to the Internet and a web browser, a wiki is an incredibly effective tool for writing to the web.

When you're ready to take the next step with wikis, you can use them for "partially collaborative" projects. Multiple individuals, again only requiring access to a web browser, can participate together in the building of information in one website. In a "partially collaborative" wiki, while they are publishing together to a single website, their content does not overlap and may be delegated or assigned. Classic classroom examples of this are collaborative study guides to an AP exam, where different teams of students work to document the answers to different questions. The great bulk of educational use is with "partially collaborative" wikis.

For the really brave, you can move to the really dark magic of "fully collaborative" publishing with a wiki. In this method of using a wiki, multiple individuals work together and often work //on the same content//. [|Wikipedia] is a good example of a fully-collaborative wiki. While it might seem that allowing many people the ability to work on, modify, or overwrite each others work would result in chaos, it typically results in the participants choosing to write in a thoughtful, non-partisan fashion so that others will feel comfortable with the content and minimizing the need for a tug-of-war (this is known as reaching a "neutral point of view"). Most wiki software allows for a mirrored "discussion" page for each page of content, where contributors can actually talk over the content of the page and their feelings about how it should be presented. Some of the most interesting classroom lessons involve looking at the discussion page of a highly-debated topic and watching how consensus is formed, or watching the content on a page (and the discussion) grow after a significant news event occurs.