Collaborative writing. The world of wiki’s.

Writing together in team on an article, a publication, a project or a toolkit, it more and more happens in the wiki way. If wiki still sounds chinese for you have first a look at wiki’s in plain English.  Almost ten  years ago the wiki way of building collaboratively knowledge started to grow slowly with Wikipedia as it’s most successful example. Now more and more organisations rely on wiki’s to support the collaborative writing process. Avoiding endless e-mail-conversations with word-documents that lost track of versions, the wiki-approach allows groups easily to work together in one document just by clicking the edit-button and start the writing process.

Starting up a wiki is one thing and rather easy nowadays. It takes you three steps to open an account on wikispaces, pbworks, google docs and plenty of other wiki-tools that are currently out there. (cf. wikimatrix).  Another thing is to keep the wiki alive, structured and methodologically clear. Wikipatterns might be a useful resource to structure your wiki-approach in your organisation. It is a useful toolbox that orients you in different patterns and anti-patterns that give structure to every stage of your wiki.  Feel free to contribute any other methodological resources that orient us better in this interesting world of wiki’s.

Here you will find some additional wiki-resources with an emphasis on the pedagogical and didactic added value of a wiki-approach:

– The pedagogical potential of wiki’s.
– O’Reilly’s introduction to wiki’s
– Using wiki’s to build learning communities
– Seven things you should know about a wiki (Educause)
– Eight things you can do with an enterprise wiki