A wiki is an incomparable tool for social learning! It is at its best in collaborative writing, but it also works well as information storage, as a discussion board, or in internal communication.
A wiki is often automatically associated with Wikipedia, but it really is a piece of software that can be used in any type of content production. It’s easiest for the teacher to use the services where you can open your own wiki in a matter of minutes, as easily as a blog. It doesn’t tax your technical skills to simply click on the Edit and Save buttons. WikiSpaces and WikiDot, among others, offer free wikis.
For teaching, however, I can also warmly recommend the public wiki projects. The students are normally excited about taking part in international projects, and open publication is motivational.
Wikipedia offers suitable source material and can be supplemented with new articles: also, the existing articles are easy to edit and new ones can be created by translating Wikipedia entries from other languages. Wikipedia articles are good for teaching critical reading skills – is the treatment trustworthy, unbiased and comprehensive? What literature has been used as source material? Have the sources been correctly cited?
Wikibooks is an exciting place to produce textbooks together with students. The best policy is probably to start with existing books by complementing them and using them as course material. Books written in other languages can be translated and added to the English library. In one of my courses, health care students compiled a guide in Wikibooks for writing medical texts.
Wiktionary is a handy source, and in language teaching it functions as a living workbook. There are plenty of interesting things the students can do with the words – such as finding and adding translations, inflections, synonyms and antonyms.
Wikimedia Commons gives you the chance to download free images and media clips for study assignments and teaching material.
The most natural use for a wiki is group work. The best way to do this is by splitting the class in small groups of 3–5 people, so that the responsibility is more evenly shared than in a bigger group. Working becomes more efficient if you assign each member of the group their respective roles. The benefit of a wiki in group work is that the interaction is tightly wound round the content.
In teacher-student interaction, a wiki enables precise feedback. It is useful for the learner to receive a concrete suggestion on how to make their own piece of work better, instead of general commentary. At its best, a wiki helps create the relationship of a master and apprentice, in which an expert can show how he would proceed in the task.
What Is a Wiki is a good guide for using the wiki. You will get the real idea of working with wikis by participating in the writing of wikibooks or by supplementing the articles from your own field on Wikipedia. Give it a shot and be inspired!