One of the tools used to leverage collaborative intelligence and enable students to ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants’(Cope and Kalantzis 2016) is the wiki.  

In essence, a wiki is a website whose structure and content can be modified by multiple users directly from the web browser (Wikipedia 2016). A key characteristic is the ability for users to hotlink between different wiki pages (Friedberg 2011) leading to ‘meaningful topic associations’ (Wikipedia 2016). For example, if a student is working on a page on Germany and mentions the capital Berlin, a link can be made from the word ‘Berlin’ to a new page containing more detailed information. The first wiki was built by Ward Cunningham going live in March 1995 with wikis spreading rapidly in the early 2000s (ibid). The following video from Commoncraft outlines the key features of wikis and how they work in practice.

https://www.commoncraft.com/video/wikis

Wikis are seen to have several advantages  especially useful in fostering collaborative intelligence. First of all, they can enable people to work together and share ideas (JISC 2008), they can create a large amount of information very quickly (Friedberg 2011), and they can offer huge efficiency gains for certain tasks (JISC 2014). Another advantage is that errors are often quickly corrected by other users (Wikipedia 2016). The in-built ability to hotlink also allows students to have non-linear interaction with the content (Friedberg 2011).

There has been some criticism of wikis, however, although it could be argued that this is outweighed by its advantages. There are concerns about the security and trustworthiness of some of the content on ‘open’ wikis. For example, malware can be imported into Wiki pages (Wikipedia 2016). Another problem, in my experience, is that some wikis can become vague and contain plagiarised content. For this reason, it is very important for students to be given clear guidelines and be shown worked examples of good practice as mentioned in the course videos (Cope and Kalantzis 2016).

There are two main types of Wikis; open and closed. Open wikis are those which are available to the public at large and closed wikis which are for a restricted community (Wikipedia 2016). Probably the most famous example of an open wiki, is Wikipedia, launched  in 2001 (ibid). Closed wikis tend to be more common, especially in education. Some of these are organisational wikis such as the CIA’s Intellipedia (Wikipedia 2016). Wikis are also heavily used in Higher Education (Friedberg 2011), an example being the Brookes Wiki at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom (Brookes 2016). There is also evidence of Wikis being used in secondary/K12 education (Grant 2006).

References

Grant L (2006) Using Wikis in Schools: A Case Study in Futurelab. Available at https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/FUTL98/FUTL98.pdf [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Unknown Wiki in Wikipedia. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Friedberg (2011) J. Using Blogs and Wikis in Higher Education. Available at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfxKCb2OHQ [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Unknown Wikis by Commoncraft. Available at https://www.commoncraft.com/video/wikis [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Unknown (Sep. 2014) Crowdsourcing: The Wiki Way of Working in JISC. Available at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/crowdsourcing [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Unknown (April 2008) Keynote Speaker Hails the Collaborative Power of Wikis in JISC. Available at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/podcasts/keynote-speaker-hails-the-collaborative-power-of-wikis-07-apr-2008

[Accessed Sep.11, 2016]

Cope W, Kalantzis M (2016) E Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age. Available at https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning [Accessed Sep.11, 2016]