Using Wikis in Instructional Design

By Walter Campbell

I was thinking about additional resources for a class on open-source software at a local community college. Usually, I include a list of resources (Web sites, books, etc.) on the class syllabus, but this has two drawbacks.

First, the syllabus is a static document, whereas the resources are dynamic-some blinking into or out of existence every day. Second, space is usually tight. I try to keep syllabi to one page, which means whittling resource lists to the handful that seem most useful and will fit on whatever space is available.

Instead, I wanted something that could be as large as necessary, easily updated, and accessible to everyone long after the class ended. Better still would be something students could update as easily as I could. The open-source movement has a communal spirit, and I wanted to foster that same sense of community in the class. An online resource we could collectively maintain for our mutual benefit seemed ideal.

After considering several options-a Web site, mailing list, an online community (such as a Yahoo group), and a blog-I decided we needed a wiki.

Wiki Basics

A wiki is a collection of documents that can be viewed and modified by anyone, using a Web browser. (For a more expansive definition, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki.) Traditional Web sites typify the top-down approach to creating content: the author writes and publishes; the rest of us read.

With a wiki, we can all read, write, and rewrite. There's no distinction between author, editor, and reader. We're all collaborators. This bottom-up approach to creating content isn't the only difference between wikis and traditional Web sites. Whereas Web sites are typically built using HTML editors or full-fledged Web development tools, wiki content is created with the same tool used to view it: a Web browser.

Content-sometimes formatted as HTML, sometimes using a proprietary syntax that can take some getting used to-appears in a browser window. When finished editing, the collaborator clicks a button and the updated content is posted to the wiki.

When launching a wiki, you can either use a hosted service that provides and maintains the back-end software, sometimes called a wiki engine, or you can set up the engine yourself. Hosted services are available from companies such as Jotspot (http://www.jot.com/index.php), while freely available wiki engines include UseMod (http://www.usemod.com) and Oddmuse (http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki). For a list of top wiki engines, visit http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?TopTenWikiEngines.

For me, the choice was simple. The class wiki would likely be small, perhaps no more than a dozen pages. Likewise, I expect it will be viewed by dozens, not thousands, of people. Setting up my own wiki would mean spending more time tuning-up the engine than creating content. So I looked for a low-cost/no-cost hosted service. I finally settled on Schtuff.com (http://www.schtuff.com), which offers free hosted wiki services and 200 MB of data storage.

With Schtuff.com, I can enable as many or as few people as I like to modify content-so I can safeguard the wiki against troublemakers-such as the vandals who caused the Los Angeles Times to shut down their wiki within a week of its launch. Also, Schtuff.com allows me to back up the site's content, so I can easily restore it if anything unfortunate happens.

Wikis as Bulletin Boards

Compared to traditional Web sites, wikis' structures tend to be highly organic-there's no telling where or when new content will appear. Despite (or perhaps because of) this lack of formal structure, wikis are used to share information across a community. For example, the University of Illinois's student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery uses a wiki to provide information on administrative matters and upcoming events (https://www-s.acm.uiuc.edu/wiki/space/home).

A bulletin board is what I envision the class wiki, Open Source Tech Writer (http://opensourcetechwriter.schtuff.com), being used as. I and other collaborators can announce new/updated software, offer opinions, share tips, request help, and support each other in our use of open-source software.

Of course, you don't need a wiki for this. Traditional online bulletin boards allow for this type of communication and include helpful features that wikis typically lack, such as the ability to sort discussions by author, topic, and date. But wikis are well suited to sharing relatively small amounts of information that will be regularly updated.

For example, suppose I want to create a document with information about the latest release of OpenOffice.org. With a traditional bulletin board, I'd have to post a new message with each new version. The There would eventually be half a dozen "New OpenOffice.org released!" messages, and readers would have to sort them by date to figure out which message was for the most recent version.

With a wiki there's one-and only one-page devoted to the latest OpenOffice.org release. Whenever a new version appears, someone edits the page as needed.

Wikis as Textbooks

Because wikis support collaborative authoring and can be easily updated, they're now being used by some authors and instructional designers as textbooks. Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page) is a collection of wiki textbooks anyone can edit. The best-known wiki book is likely Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), an encyclopedia both celebrated for the bottom-up approach to authoring it encourages and derided for the uneven and sometimes shoddy quality of (and inaccuracies in) the entries that result from this approach.

Personally, I'm not sold on the idea of using a wiki to create a book. Unless you're using a self-installed wiki engine, you may have limited control over the book's layout and formatting. Also, the same strengths that make wikis well suited for use as a bulletin board-namely the ability for anyone to edit anything-could work against authors. Writing is hard enough without having to continually determine who changed what, when, where, and why.

Wikis as Documents

Wikis may not be ideal for creating long, linear manuscripts (such as books), but they're well suited for writing articles, reports, and other types of smaller, collaborative documents. For example, University of Washington Professor Jan Spyridakis collaborated with a student research group that used a wiki to author a paper for the Society for Technical Communication ... on wikis (see Wikis for Supporting Distributed Collaborative Work at http://depts.washington.edu/intres/presentations.shtml).

Instructional designers and trainers can similarly use wikis as an authoring tool or environment for writing-related projects. Not only can students use wikis to create documents, instructors can use them to provide feedback or coordinate peer reviews.

Additional Uses

Wikis are flexible enough to be used as more than just bulletin boards, textbooks, and documents. For example, Professor Spyridakis said her research group also used a wiki to create agendas for group meetings, track "to-do" lists, and store the group's work.

She explained that a wiki was a useful tool for the group because, "It could be modified as group knowledge and work evolved-we have been able to adapt the tool to suit the work processes that have emerged over time and with new group members. It has also helped all members take ownership in multiple aspects of projects because information is always available to all members, new or old."

For more wiki uses, visit http://www.willamette.edu/%7Ejmeyerto/goodwikibloguse.htm. There Jo Meyertons, director of instructional design and development at Willamette University, has offered suggestions on how wikis might be used. As she notes, wikis are well suited to "collaborative writing tasks or any other team-based document creation tasks that require simple, ubiquitous, trackable access."

Whether you use them as a bulletin board, a course text, or an authoring environment, I hope you'll consider incorporating wikis into your instructional design and training projects. You may find they make courses more engaging, simplify communication among learners, and faciliate peer learning. (And if you're interested in open-source software, I hope you'll drop by Open Source Tech Writer, too.)

Walter Campbell is a technical writer at Sakson & Taylor, a content design and development firm in Seattle. He also teaches courses related to technical communications at Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Washington.

Reprinted by permission from the author.

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