Moodle Monday: Wiki Activity

Today Moodle Monday is looking at the Wiki Activity, a wiki is a collection of collaboratively authored web documents, Wikipedia is the most famous example of a wiki.

Wikis get their name from the Hawaiian term “wiki wiki,” which means “very fast.” A wiki is indeed a fast method for creating content as a group. It’s a very popular format on the Web for creating documents as a group. There is usually no central editor of a wiki, no single person who has final editorial control. Instead, the community edits and develops its own content.

In Moodle, wikis can be a powerful tool for collaborative student work. All participants in a course can edit a document together, creating a class product, or each student can have their own wiki and work on it with you and their classmates. A wiki starts with one front page, which everyone can edit in the browser without needing to know HTML. Each author can add other pages to the wiki by simply creating a link to a page that doesn’t exist yet. A history of previous versions of each page in the wiki is kept, listing the edits made by each participant. This video goes through adding a wiki in more detail:

Written instructions on how to set up the Wiki Activity in Moodle.

Wikis and the 3E Framework

Below is an example of how the Wiki activity can be used in conjunction with the 3E element of the TEL Quality Framework.

• Enhance – Create a module/assignment knowledge-base for students.
• Extend – Create a lecture notes wiki. Ask student groups to take responsibility each week for populating the wiki with a summary of the lecture/seminar.
• Empower – Have students work in groups to create and manage a wiki to demonstrate evidence of planning and preparation for a group work project.

For instructions on how to use wikis after the teacher has added a wiki activity in Moodle see the Moodle Docs help page.

Have you used the wiki activity in your teaching and learning? Are you thinking about getting your students to work collaboratively? Will you try using the wiki activity now you’ve read this blog post? If you have any questions or would like any more help, information or advice, then please post in the comments below, or contact TEL@yorksj.ac.uk.

Emma