I have required that students in one of my graduate technology classes (Digital Media and the Internet in Schools) add a tutorial on a self-selected web tool or service to a wiki. As the Fall semester approaches, I have thought about the value of this requirement. The interest in and perhaps the value of wikis just isn’t what it used to be. For example, Wikispaces, a service used by many educators, will cease operation at the end of this month. Of course, there is Wikipedia, but I even imagine I see fewer mentions of this resource.
I like my wiki assignment within the context of my course because it required experience with a wiki and it gave the students the opportunity to explore a tool or service appropriate to their own needs. This was intended as a two for one authentic task. It offered the additional benefit of offering a resource to other educators and the students from my class to explore what students from other years had investigated.
What has become of the wiki? Here are some thoughts.
The notion of a participatory web benefitting from the wisdom of the crowd may have waned. Perhaps we have become jaded by recent developments when it comes to collaborating for free to benefit each other.
Perhaps the wiki as a tool has been replaced by other tools that are simply easier to use. I make use of mediawiki which is the same tool used to offer wikipedia, but this tool seems more difficult to use for collaboration than say a shared Google doc. I admit I have not made the effort to determine if there is an easier to use version of mediawiki.
