Summary of the video “WIKI IN PLAIN ENGLISH"

Summary of the video “WIKI IN PLAIN ENGLISH"

The video mainly talks about Importance of the wikis and how it can be used to promote collaborative learning. Further it also provides an example of four friends going for a trip and finding difficulty in the co-ordination and organization of the things to carry. As it is the key to plan and plan well and coordinating, they could not accomplish the organization and coordination of their group input by using E-mail. And the speaker then tells us the Importance of a wiki website as a user-friendly and easy to use, as it allows one to edit, save, create, and link different pages.

Then, in the video, Mary sign up for a wiki site and create two lists for campaigning entitled 1)‘what we have' and 2)'what we need'. She then finishes the process and saves it. Respectively John, Henry and Frank edit the page according to their plans and make successful arrangements.

What is WIKI???

The article is all about a wiki which is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions. The first wiki “WikiWikiWeb” was designed by Cunningham and Bo Leuf in 1995 as an open collaborative community website where anyone can contribute.

It can be used for a large variety of tasks for a large variety of tasks from personal to collaborative tasks. The possibilities might make wikis seem like a daunting system, but commitment to simplicity makes wiki tools a breeze. Some of the advantages of using wikis are 1) wikis simplify editing your websites by using simple markup language 2) it also records document histories 3) it is simple to create a link by just putting the title in brackets or a new page 4) and finally it keep a track of all the stuff. It encourages people to create a website collaboratively and provides knowledge bases and direct access to the website. The most popular wiki is Wikipedia (an extensive online editable encyclopedia).

To conclude we can state that wikis are hypertext tools that allow managing the content / editing and creating a static websites.

How it could be used for language learning???

In context of language wikis can bring wonders for the learners of language, as it is an open forum enhancing learners’ autonomy and language is learnt in a free environment only. It provides the students with such a communicative or conducive environment for grasping the best knowledge from the greatest source (internet) itself.

There might be different objectives that can be achieved such as, developing the writing skills, developing academic writing, problem solving through collaboration and many more. One of the tasks that come to my mind is to enhance writing and communication skills of the students.

In order to develop the writing skills of the learners the tutor can ask the students to write anything authentic (after a small research) and create a wiki on the same. For example, if the topic is the Anglo-Saxon Age and their life style, the students can refer to resources/references and write something on the wikis which could be edited by other students and once they feel the topic is complete the tutor or any other researcher can authenticate the post or wiki. And in a way the students have come up with an authentic web page on the topic.

This way the learner can communicate and develop their writing skills.