Reading, writing, and revising with wiki technology: tutorial presentation

Appropriate use of wikis in teaching can enhance development of reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. The best known wiki is probably Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia with over five million articles in over 250 languages, but wiki technology presents possibilities well beyond its Wikipedian use. A wiki allows users very easily to collaborate to create and edit documents, and links between documents -- effectively making a website -- without needing to acquire a new set of skills. Wikis also enable users to track changes to documents, viewing any previous version of a page to see how it evolved and who made which changes. This support for collaboration and revision tracking encourages innovations that extend and expand upon common teaching methods. Our tutorial gives participants opportunities to work with wiki-based exercises involving close reading and peer review. It alternates between presentation of key ideas and techniques, hands-on activities, and discussion. We also present survey results that assess the exercises' effectiveness of exercises we have already implement for use in classes. This tutorial is primarily targeted at faculty who want to learn about wikis and ways to use wikis in their courses to support reading, writing, and revising. It should also be of value to students interested in thesetopics. Between them, the facilitators have experience using wikis in first year seminars, for team project courses, and to support collaborations across and between institutions. Development and presentation of this tutorial is supported by a Hewlett Packard Technology for Teaching grant.