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THE USE OF WIKIS in education has increased dramatically over the last two years. Web entries and conference sessions abound, but there is still a lot of confusion about what Wikis are and how to use them. In a short amount of space, I can't possibly provide all that you might want to know about Wikis, but I can say emphatically that they are effective tools for educators.
The most familiar Wiki is Wikipedia, a "Webbased free-content multilingual encyclopedia project. It is... a website that allows any visitor to freely edit its content" (Wikipedia, 2006). Although Wikipedia has been the subject of a few scandals over inaccuracies-an accepted risk of the format-a peer review of several articles found Wikipedia's accuracy is similar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Giles, 2005). As such, it can be a good starting point for research.
The good news is that Wikipedia, as a product (and with all of its flaws) is not the subject I want to cover. Rather, I would like to share the ways in which Wikis-as a process tool -can be used by educators. The real promise of Wikis, and what makes them such a powerful educational technique, is the fact that Wikis facilitate group collaboration. Another important educational feature is the Wiki's ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. At...