If you look at most treatments of wiki in the classroom, people talk about collaboration, group projects, easy publishing, revision control. All of these are important. But one important element of what makes a wiki a wiki has been underutilized.
Wikis not only introduced the editable page to users, but the idea of page-creating links. (In fact, this invention pre-dates wiki and even the web, having been first pioneered in the Hypercard implementation Ward Cunningham wrote for documenting software patterns).
Page-creating links are every bit as radical as the user-edited page — perhaps even more so. What page-creating links allow you to do, according to Cunningham, is map out the edges of your knowledge — the places you need to connect or fill in. You write a page (or a card) and you look at it and ask — what on this page needs explanation? What connections can we make? Then you link to resources that don’t exist yet. Clicking on those links gives you not an error, but an invitation to create that page. The new page contains both links back to concepts you’ve already documented, but also generates new links to uncreated resources. In this way the document “pushes out from the center” with each step both linking back to old knowledge and identifying new gaps.
In the video below I show this “pushing out from the center” process on a wiki of my own and talk about how this architecture and process relates to intergrative learning. For best viewing, hit HD button and make full screen.
Using Wiki for Connected, Integrative Learning from Mike Caulfield on Vimeo.
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