Comments on: Are Wikis Dying?

By: Wikispaces Extends Free Education Wikis to Higher-Ed | The Thinking Stick

Wikispaces Extends Free Education Wikis to Higher-Ed | The Thinking Stick — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:16:17 +0000

[...] wikispace blog next week. Last year at ISTE 2010 I led a discussion at EdubloggerCon titled "Are Wikis Dying" it was a great conversation and the comments on the blog post added some value as well. Adam, and [...]

By: Is SaaS Dead? No. Neither is Debate.

Is SaaS Dead? No. Neither is Debate. — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 02:37:39 +0000

[...] had email dead, resumes dead, wikis dead themes, now it’s apparently time for the SaaS is Dead meme, thanks to a recently published [...]

By: Jacqui

Jacqui — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:37:03 +0000

I’m a tech teacher for K-5, and I sure hope wikis aren’t dying. I have spent two years dragging, pleading, begging my colleagues to move into the 21st century of education. Wikis are my only chance to do it because they’re intuitive, attractive, student-centered, student-generated.

Say it ain’t so…

By: Necrofilia 2.0 — Planeta RUM

Necrofilia 2.0 — Planeta RUM — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:48:56 +0000

[...] adelante, le toco el turno a los wikis y se ha cuestionado si están muriendo. Si los wikis están muriendo pues han sabido muy bien como resucitar [...]

By: Melissa Schwartz

Melissa Schwartz — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:24:35 +0000

I agree with your take on this issue. I just recently read in an article that Wikipedia has been shown to contain fewer mistakes than the most recent edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is a specific use of the wiki format. It is, as you put it, a collaborative effort centered around creating and sharing content. It’s not about documents and attachments; it’s about sharing useful information in a centralized “community”. That is the heart of wiki and that will never stop being a fundamental part of what the internet is.

By: Jon McHugh

Jon McHugh — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:02:44 +0000

I don’t believe that wikis are dying. Many faculty members at my school use either wikis Google apps/ docs or Moodle. All are great tool for learning, collaborating and sharing.

By: David Russell

David Russell — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:44:57 +0000

I too wish I could have been there for the discussion at ISTE but if anyone is still reading this blog, here are my two cents. Wikis have been a strong part of what we do at my school and district for some time now and I do not believe they are dying at all. On the contrary, I think they are evolving to fit the needs of their users. The beauty of wikis is they can become a repository for a small or large group of people’s work. It holds so many different types of media (uploaded or embedded) which can be shared and discussed. It is a place in which users can bring all those other web 2.0 elements into one place in order to add to the new knowledge gained and yet is so simple that learning how to use one is not a huge struggle. This is key when working with some teachers who are very slow to adopt new tools for meeting the needs of professional growth or student learning. I just started a new one today for a group of teachers in our district and that wiki will then be shared to the world as a place to go for learning and collaborating.

By: Mark Carls

Mark Carls — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:22:40 +0000

Not sure if they’re dying either. But, I like what you said about does just uploading a word document to a wiki page make it a wiki? I like them because they’re quick to set up and share content, but I don’t get much collaboration with mine. The best examples I’ve seen are students using wikis as online notebooks in Randolph like Geoff Olson’s class: http://rcsmath7.wikispaces.com/
It’s like Country music, they’ll evolve and to keep up with Wave, docs, Etherpad and such, they’ll have to transform. Maybe into this music that has no twang in it at all anymore? We’ll see. Great question to post and from what I heard, great session at Edubloggercon.
Mark

By: Doug Harvey

Doug Harvey — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:06:06 +0000

To me wikis are best thought of as digital encyclopedias or databases, and that is way I present them to teachers. Much like those who see them as online textbooks, I see them as the best tool when you want to generate a lasting, fairly stable yet not inflexible collection of information. I have often though the use of wikis for classroom websites and the like were bad fits for the tool, though it was interesting to see the ingenuity of people who did that.

I think going forward, the encyclopedic use of wikis is their niche.

By: Stephanie Sandifer

Stephanie Sandifer — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:21:02 +0000

Hi Jeff,

I wish I could have been present for this discussion at EBC10 — I definitely do not think wikis are dying out. Wikis have been around much longer than any other “Web 2.0″ tool, and I think they serve a very specific purpose.

Perhaps what may be happening is that as people become more sophisticated with their use of all of these tools they are learning how, when, and where best to use each tool. As many others have stated in the comments on this post, wikis work very well for some uses, but not for all uses — and I have seen many uses of wikis in education that I would not classify as “best use.” (example: using wikis to just create static websites full of links, but with no collaboration from others in creating those links or any other content)

Another aspect of this — one that I mention in my presentations and workshops on wikis — is that other tools that came after wikis have adopted some wiki features (like history of revisions in Google Docs) because those features are so useful. I don’t think wikis are dying and I do think that we will continue to see their influence as these tools — and our use of them — continues to evolve.

Stephanie