This is an article by Audrey Watters for Edutopia. It is a great overview & guide for teachers on the fence about using wikis with their students.
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Why Wikis Still Matter | Edutopia
Wiki is a Hawai’ian word meaning “fast” or “quick.” As a technology platform, Ward Cunningham installed the very first wiki on the Web in 1995. That was two years before the word “weblog” was coined (and four years before that term was shortened to “blog”). Wikis predate Facebook and Twitter by roughly a decade. At sixteen years old, the wiki predates almost every other social media tool (other than email, of course, which historians of technology say turns 40 this year). Why then, in the face of rapidly changing technology — all the new bells and whistles and Web 2.0 tools — should we still use wikis?
