Quotes Supporting Purposes of Wikis in Writing Instruction

From WolfWikis

Main reasons:

• Collaboration (COL)

Instructor Survey:

• I turn these lemons into lemonade by treating the development of structures and conventions for the wiki as a class project. The students get to determine the major pages and structure of the wiki, as well as the requirements and forms of contributions. This approach teaches students valuable collaboration and negotiation skills. This does make the first couple of weeks of the semester seem a bit chaotic, but once everyone gets in the groove, it's a very efficient way for students to interact online. – Miles Kimball

• I think the advantage of the wiki is that students can go there and refine, revise, and add to the text world that the wiki is holding. They can add to it if they want, but they can also change things. And so if you think of a class project, or maybe several wikis where students are working in groups, it becomes entirely collaborative. If you imagine you have a class of twenty students and you have groups of four and you set up five different wikis and each group has a project they are working on together and the product will be at this wiki as an information thing with maybe links, it becomes completely seamless collaboration in terms of people actually going in and changing people’s work and adding content. But it is still a single text. It is not layers of text and it’s not one text added to another. That part of the technology really intrigues me. – Chris Anson (Interview)

• I think what wikis do is add a potentially collaborative, revision-based dimension to what is often a solitary activity. In typical courses in higher education, students write papers outside of class, they do them alone, they turn them in and get graded. The wiki compels people to be able to add information to an existing growing context or change the information already there. So if you have someone working on a project on gun control, people can go in and edit, add, or change information. – Chris Anson (Interview)

• Centered location (CL)

• Wikis allow students to collaborate in a flexible environment they control and create themselves. In Deleuze and Guatari's terms, wikis are rhizomes; discussion boards and CMS's (both course and content) are trees. Threaded discussion lists are inherently hierarchical, allowing few connections from one thread to another. And CMS's depend on a directory/folder hierarchy to create the structure for users. Wikis, however, allow a community of people to create a dynamic structure that grows and changes with use. In my experience, this flexibility leads to greater creativity in collaboration than hierarchical technologies do. – Miles Kimball

• "Now, rather than "pushing" separate copies of the document to each person, all collaborators are "pulled" in to a central place where everyone sees the same text." – Stuart Mader

• The wiki fosters collaborative writing and group projects b/c all have equal access to the composing and revising spaces. It also enables people to collaboratively write without hassling with multiple files and/or having to meet f2f. I believe all writing and communication are collaborative processes and that it's in coversation with others that our ideas are most fully developed, pushed, and refined. The wiki at Miami is password protected at muohio.edu/composition. So it's not fully public but students in other courses can look at wiki writing done by students in other classes, so wikis also foster cross-classroom collaborations. – Heidi McKee (Survey)

• Facilitation of work (FOW)
• WSS:

• Analytical skills (ANA) and Synthesize Info (SI)

(WIS) Instructor Survey:

• Direct interaction with primary materials (DIM)
• Respond to reading (RTR)

• Ease of use (EOU)

~ Wikis (I think, at least) are easier to learn than course management systems. The name, "wiki," after all, comes from "wiki-wiki," the Hawaiian term for "quick." The syntax is purposefully simple; most people need no more than five minutes of training to do basic things like edit text, make links, and create new pages. And WYSIWYG page editors are now popping up in more and more wiki engines, avoiding the need to learn even this basic wiki syntax. WebCT and BlackBoard might be more familiar to users now than they used to be, but they're still clunky and confining apps that take longer to get used to than wikis do. This simplicity makes wikis great for efficient collaborative work. – Miles Kimball

• Authorship/ownership (AUT/OWN) ~ My feeling, and I may yet be unable to put it fully into words, is that the collaboration that happens when a person downloads and comments on, even overwrites a text, is a very different kind of collaboration then when someone is working on a collaborative wiki document. This may go back to an older, text bound sensibility, but it's one I think we share with our students to some extent, that when one gets something off of webCT, for instance, it is just a copy; it's still someone else's work. Because a wiki is spatially and temporally dis-embedded, the sense of authorship really can (and in the best classes) does extend to everyone using it. It's a different, I'd argue better, kind of collaboration than the download-feedback-upload cycle. - Dayna Goldstein ~ "Further complicating the currency problem is the fact that much CBPP work also dissolves the traditional roles of author and reader, asking students to work in collaboration with either other writing students, or people in the CBPP network who are not enrolled in the class, or both." (134) - Cummings

~ "CBPP does not erase the identity of authorship by obfuscating identity through collaboration. Instead, CBPP fundamentally transforms identity by clarifying the audience’s access to the text. When the roles of author and audience become interchangeable and fluctuate rapidly, then control over a text requires a consensus between authors and audience. CBPP is not only a more “fluid and dynamic” rhetorical situation than Ede and Lunsford could have anticipated in 1984, but it is also a full manifestation of what they called “the integrated, interdependent nature of reading and writing” (321)." (140) – Cummings

~ "Wikis differ from blogs and discussion boards in that they offer a radical approach to authorship. Simply put, wikis are web sites that anyone can edit; communities rather than individual authors author them. Of these three online writing environments, wikis seem to offer the most to writers interested in collaboration and consensus-building." (178) – Matt Barton “Future of Rational-Critical Debate”

~ "Leuf and Cunningham (2001) have argued, “Wiki is inherently democratic” (p. 17). It is no surprise, then, that the best metaphor to describe a wiki’s function is that of a state constitution. Wikis are democratic in that the apparent status of individual users is not observed, but also in a more profound way: Wikis emphasize a progressive, democratic aspect of writing that is mostly ignored by the commercial press, where only the finished product is represented." (187) – Barton

~ "Wikis, however, are a good example of decentralized use of media.” – Anja Glaser “Toward Emancipatory Use”

~ "In most cases, however, wikis are administered by a group of people with equal rights who control each other and whose work and decisions are subject to all users’ discussion." - Glaser

~ ". . . wikis challenge notions of traditional authority and traditional academic legitimatingcriteria." (189) - Barton

~ Interacting with these pages of text moves them from the private and therefore protected space of a passive reader into the firing line and activity of an author. - Erin Webster Garrett (Survey)

o Student ethos (SE) o Publish content (PUB)

• Audience extension (AU) ~ “. . . one of the main benefits of teaching writing in a large scale wiki environment is that it replaces the writing teacher with a real audience and allows the teacher to truly coach the writers to create more effective prose . . .” – Robert Cummings

~ "CBPP provides the synthesis for appending the market and firm models of writing. In the CBPP model, writers are trained to maximize their creativity and productivity in constructing responses to the varied demands the professional audience, as both delivered and received over a network. Similarly, the instructor is relieved of the necessity to assess students’ interests and aptitudes for their topic selection, placing that job in the hands of those best-situated to address it and thereby improving the writers’ invention process. Instructors are freed to counsel students as they devise and publish writing projects, applying their knowledge of critical thinking skills to the demands of professional standards." (105) – Robert Cummings

~ "CBPP supplies an audience-specific context for topic selection, material development, presentation, and reader response, improving the development of each by reducing the writers’ transaction costs and, in effect, their proximity to an audience." (105) – Robert Cummings

~ "The difference is that within the CBPP environment the potential gap between audience addresses and audience invoked is considerably diminished." (141) – Cummings

~ The students initially feel uncomfortable editing the articles (or having their articles edited) because the work they've done before now has primarily been individually created. They must also think about how the information they've written for one format (oral presentation) must be rewritten for a textual document and what their audience ! (both their classmates and the strangers in the other section) need from the article. - Jennifer Veltsos

~ Their sense of audience is enhanced and made more concrete and realistic because the wiki gives makes it easy for classmates to read each others' work and leave comments. – Joe Grohens (Survey)

o Peer-review (PR) o Social space (SP) (SS) Help communicate 9 14 23 0 39% 61% 0 100.00%

~ My goal is to help students experience simulations of the real writing situations they will experience when they leave the university. The wiki helps me accomplish several goals: collaboration, working with strangers, giving up authorial control, and thinking about audience. - Jennifer Veltsos

~ That's probably another reason I use wikis in writing classes: It becomes the students' workspace, in large part, their collective - if not collaborative - workspace. – MC Morgan (Email)

~ I use the wiki to provide students a space to complete course work that might have otherwise been completed using word processing. There are two primary benefits. 1) Students are able to complete their work over time in a consistently available place. 2) Students can work collaboratively on projects. The wiki enables me to check the process of students' work and even contribute to their understanding with comments on particular wiki projects. – John Lee (Survey)

~ "The way we are in space—how we act, what we say, the way we say it, and to whom—contributes to who we are in space. That contribution in turn helps to establish the ownership of space and its normative productions of social identities and relations." (486) – Darin Payne “English studies in Levittown.”

o Facilitates community (FC)

~ Helps facilitate community between and among students, especially in terms of professional development for pre-service teachers. – Carl Young (Survey)

• Enhancing teaching and learning (ETL) (SS) Helps learn 2 17 4 23 8.50% 74% 17.50% 0 100.00%

o Think creatively (TCRE) think creatively 2 6 6 3 17 12.00% 35.50% 35.50% 17% 100%

o Think critically (TCRI) (IS) think critically 1 4 12 17 6% 24% 70.00% 0% 100%

o Improve reading (IR) (SS) improve reading 14 7 2 23 61% 30.50% 8.50% 0 100.00%

(IS) improve reading 1 10 6 17 6% 58.00% 36.00% 0% 100%

~ Moreover, while I have not yet done any sort of detailed analysis to verify this, my impression is that their writing has improved and that students are becoming better at reading critically. – Yasha Hartberg (Survey)

~ . . . students' assumption of a collaborative role in both the creation and investigation of this new digital edition has proven essential. All along, they have been more than forthcoming regarding what they think future generations of readers will need to make sense out of the text. This semester thanks to being asked to read the novel in the WIKI space rather than play with a chapter piecemeal , they have also been forthcoming with their resistance to digitizing texts. As English majors, they are appalled at the idea of studying a book that is no longer a book. And in this way they have brought attention to one of the important questions first posed by Roger Chartier but now testable in laboratories such as projects like the Web of Mind: that is, to what degree does the material fact or nature of a text as an object (its color,! weight, texture, smell, or lack thereof) control what readers comprehend and how they make sense of what they’ve comprehended? In their insight journals and in class discussion, students have complained about the depersonalization of the text, the coldness of it, and its lack of character. Through these observations, they have also been awakened to the complexities of their own reading and meaning-making processes, a hoped for but not entirely expected effect. - Erin Webster Garrett (Survey)

o Increase study skills (SSK) (SS) study skills 11 11 1 23 48% 48% 4.00% 0 100.00%

(IS) study skills 6 7 4 17 36.00% 40% 24% 0% 100%

o Learn content (LC) (IS) learn content 2 7 8 17 12% 40% 48% 0% 100%

o Understand technology (UT) (IS) understand tech 1 8 8 17 6% 47% 47% 0% 100%

o Technological literacy (TL) (IS) tech literacy 2 10 5 17 12% 58.00% 30.00% 0% 100%

o Time management (TM) (IS) time management 8 7 2 17 48% 40% 12% 0% 100%

o Increase self-esteem (SELF) (IS) self-esteem 4 6 7 17 24% 36.00% 40% 0% 100%

o Teacher as guide (TAG) http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/~morgan/wiki/wiki.php/NoteBook/VirtuesOfWiki ~ In spite of the way that technology often neutralizes teacher authority, when the teacher has constructed something him/herself, students may be reluctant to "take it over" or make it something that the entire class is free to shape as they wish. Next time I might begin the actual construction of the wiki as a class activity, so students feel it's theirs from the start. – Chris Anson

~ "There are several underlying presumptions in this proposed model of the CBPP classroom. The primary belief is that the role of the writing teacher is to prepare the student writer to interact with a diverse, public, and professional audience who share knowledge and expertise about a given topic. The highest form of that interaction would be student writing that demonstrates critical thinking, subject knowlege, professional ethos, context-appropriate appeals, and a fluency of form and convention." (111) – Robert Cummings

• Knowledge Building/Reflection (KBR) o Collaborative/critical/communal knowledge building (CKB) ~ Wikis allow students to create a communal knowledge base that grows as they learn and remains valuable after the course is over. – Miles Kimball

~ Tool allows for enacting a constuctivist vision and practice of teaching and learning--it provides a space for students to construct and reconstruct knowledge--to do this individually and collaboratively. – Carl Young

~ "Because of its natural ability to let authors focus on content over technology . . . and very low cost compared to most software, the wiki is showing potential to change how information is handled and built - potential whose precedent seems second only to the Internet itself." – Stuart Mader

~ An important part of my philosophy of teaching and learning is that students must construct knowledge for themselves. The wiki seems almost uniquely suited to this task. - Yasha Hartberg (Survey)

~ For me the advantage is being able to compile information collectively (across courses, or by students within a course. – Chris Anson (WPA-L)

~ I set up wikis primarily as a collaborative knowledge-base, giving students credit for their contributions. In one theory class, each student was required to find and read one article per week (in addition to the assigned readings) on the topic we're discussing, then contribute their reading notes to build a collaborative annotated bibliography. In a more practice-oriented class, students kept design project portfolios - basically content management sites in the wiki, where they kept their design prototypes, planning documents, correspondence with clients, and reflections on their experiences (much like a blog). The possibilities aren't endless, but they're pretty darn flexible. – Miles Kimball

~ Wiki helps students wrap their minds around the concept of open source software and to become open at some level to the concept of knowledge as a shared and constructed thing rather than a found and owned thing. It reinforces my theories of teaching and learning by requiring them to collaborate on building and shaping knowledge. Not only do they confront "truth," is the information recorded here accurate, but they also confront issues of style and choices about organization. – Kerri Morris (Survey)

~ I don’t think they did merely as much as I wanted with the archive. With the third function, their own space, they really started using it at the end of the course. I wanted them to use it throughout. Two of the students said that they had their own methods of archiving and keeping track of their projects on their computers and I was asking them to use a space that felt different than what they were used to and they were not willing to do that. They were comfortable with their system and they did not want to use the wiki. I don’t think they cared whether other people saw it in the class; actually it is a public wiki so anyone can read it. So I don’t think it was the publicness of the wiki, just this is not how I normally do things. So maybe it will be counter-productive to put stuff there. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

~ "In the more classic use of the wiki, groups can use the environment to create a shared knowledge base of information. This can be used to allow students to develop a project in small groups, to work on a small piece of a larger class project, or even to have students themselves create and maintain the course Web site." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

o Critical knowledge reflection (CKR)

~ “. . . one cannot underestimate the importance of explaining the pedagogical and epistemological validity of wikis to students before implementing them in the classroom. There is a large difference between working in a massive wiki such as Wikipedia and a pbwiki within a classroom. Regardless, student writers often have strong opinions about participating in collaborative electronic writing formats, even if they don't express them upfront, which often break along the lines of foundational/anti-foundational knowledge producing schemes.” – Robert Cummings

~ The nice thing about wikis, especially when you look at Wikipedia, is that you have information with terms that link to other information and you can see what terms are not yet defined, they are usually in red. So you, as a contributor can say, “I know something about that,” and you can add to it. It is an exponentially growing base of information that if it changes people’s conceptions of writing at all, it makes them understand that knowledge is communally created and shaped. It might push them a little in that direction. – Charles Jarod (Interview) o Raises rhetoric issues (RHET)

~ These courses include writing in new modes, but I find that the wiki raises rhetorical issues and choices that that are typically hidden in print-prose. That is, writing with a wiki makes rhetoric visible. I base my courses on a social-epistemic approach to rhetoric, which wikis enact. As well, wikis lower the technical barrier to writing in new modes (hypertext, text-visual hybrids). – MC Morgan (Survey)

~ The big question I have is the way in which the construction of knowledge can be democratized in a wiki, particularly in something like Wikipedia. It has become a real resource all across the world. You have a lot of people who doubt the usefulness of Wikipedia, but I think you are seeing an emergence, and I am going to put myself in this category, that see it as a very useful tool and last year’s publication in Nature about the Wikipedia and Britannica has helped a lot of academics re-evaluate the usefulness of Wikipedia. – Joseph Moore (Interview)

~ One of the rhetorical issues is that the wiki is simply a system and it could admit to personal things, but I think it has found a niche in the options for technology for an information base. It is identified with that maybe because of Wikipedia. So I think students can have a hard time negotiating rhetorically, that distance you have when writing. You don’t see a lot of “I” in wikis. You don’t have any idea who is behind the stuff. It has been collectively created. The personal voice is not typical. It is flexible enough to use it for that but why not use something else for that like a blog. It is partly the way we socially construct the systems and how that becomes entrenched. We say, “well we know what a wiki is, what a blog is,” but they can be anything. We construct the functions in a way that they are opposed to one another. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

~ Rhetorically, in terms of process, there are things that can go wrong. Like people adding things to a wiki wrong. Information people feel is good gets changed and they are upset. Information is always slanted and biased, so someone might put information that in its very selection seems to lean toward one perspective or ideology. Then someone else comes along and says, “wait a minute, this is too conservative a view,” or something. I think that complexity could be interesting to talk about with students. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

• Course management software (CMS)

~ I think there are some differences. The tool that I have used is WebCT. I didn’t like WebCT. I felt like I was in a box and with my students and I could not really create much of anything. There are a couple of tools in WebCT that were really nice, the ability to automatically generate an email list to communicate to students and a synchronous chat feature I have used, not here, but at Georgia State. The rest of it I thought was very clumsy and not very useful. The course I talked about that I did a couple of years ago, I used a content management system that I managed to stumble my way through, called Droople, that you might be familiar with. You can just download it as a package, unpack it all, and install it on a server and have access to the server. I really bumbled my way through it but managed to get the site up and going and it did include some wiki-like functions, blogs, etc. I went out and downloaded a wiki tool and put it on a server and I created one. I really haven’t used it too much, but I have it out there. So I have my own wiki, it is sort-of devoted to social studies, but I have not got around to getting users, that is the key to this kind of technology. It is not an individual project; it needs to be a large community. – Joseph Moore (Interview)

• Effective writing (EW)

o Improve writing (IW) (IS) improve writing 1 5 11 17 6% 30.00% 64% 0% 100%

~ An important goal for me is to make them confident and comfortable with their writing. The wiki supports this by enabling them to write frequently and without too much fuss and judgement. They see that their writing can be reviewed and changed and that it then gets better. I also like being able to sit with them while they are writing and suggest changes. The Wiki facilitates this because the document is available whether it's in my office, the library, the lab. And they can try revisions w/o worrying about losing their previous draft because the version manager (we used mediawiki) preserves all iterations. – Joe Grohens (Survey)

o Writing as process (WAP)

~ Mainly because it defeats / complicates / forces users to change the typical pen and paper or word-processor process of writing. Composing on a wiki is different than writing for paper, print, or even static web pages. It doesn't matter if the wiki is being used to put together a meeting agenda collectively, posting a first draft for comments, or engaging in a thread to move towards a new understanding of creativity. Moving to a wiki means learning a new process, which means learning a new rhetoric and a new epistemic. – MC Morgan

At the very least, writing with a wiki gives students a chance to see that changing the technology of writing changes the way we write, and the way think about things. Some users don't pick up on the new process; they use the wiki like a word processor, to produce static, one-off, unlinked documents. – MC Morgan (Email)

~ The strength of the wiki, then, is its presentation of a document as a process of rational critical debate towards a specific goal." (187) – Matt Barton

~ The tool provides an excellent venue for enacting writing process theory—students can compose and post ideas, drafts, and revisions, and they can also provide feedback and suggestions for peers as well. In addition, they can collaborate on class assignments or directives for the good of the community, providing not only what they know about a particular topic or what they've found about it, but also building upon, clarifying, or enhancing, even correcting if necessary, what their peers may have composed or posted.– Carl Young (Survey)

~ Process is key in terms of writing, but it is also important in thinking about the development of ideas, theories, and practices. It is also important to the notion of developing critical reflection and becoming a reflective practicioner. – Carl Young (Survey)

~ The wiki makes revision easy and frequent, and fosters student willingness in the writing process. They can start without pain, they can work on their assignment anytime they are on the internet, they can get feedback from others and make changes easily. Writing process is a central focus of my class. - Joe Grohens (Survey)

~ When I started the discussion about using the wiki before the semester, the way I envisioned it was as a tool that would facilitate students in a process of completing one or more of their assignments. I wasn’t sure which assignments we were going to use, but I felt like the inquiry project was a good candidate for the wiki. We wanted students to work on the inquiry over a long period of time. We had a process laid out to identify a topic, and then they were to narrow the topic and get secondary sources and hopefully with primary resources write a report on the topic. What I envisioned on that project with the wiki was that they start with, literally, a sentence and they would add to that and go in at any time they want and make not only those big period revisions but also to go back and edit their work at any time, and their peers would be able to take a look at it and offer suggestions. For the most part that is how we ended up using it but it wasn’t all that we had planned. – Joseph Moore (Interview)

~ “. . . the tool enabled them to go in and edit and existing document in a really meaningful way. . . .” – Joseph Moore (Interview)

~ I see pedagogy as a process and the wiki can help us in that process and help students see their own process. – Joseph Moore (Interview) o Gets students writing online (SWO)

~ Easy way to get students' writing online so as to work with webby information design and to do peer-review. – Joe Grohens (Survey)

~ It allows distributed work, gets students writing online, allows integration with the work of others (intrawiki and on web pages), is usable without extra software, and has a very shallow learning curve. – Bradley Dilger

o Multiple drafts (MD) ~ In terms of process, the tool also allows users to see the various iterations and drafts of postings--the various steps and specific changes that lead to a current posting. – Carl Young (Survey)

o Transparency of writing (TRAN) ~ Wikis enable students to publish work and thereby increases transparency and alters their understanding of the nature of writing. Instead of being an opaque transaction between themeselves and their instructor, a piece of writing is a public interaction with their peers, their instructor, and a larger audience. – Gina Maranto (Survey)

o Changes understanding of nature of writing (NOW)

• Facilitates research (FR) ~ The wiki is also a good tool for facilitating the research process and product--inquiry based learning is an important part of our course and, ideally, an important strategy and method that our students will implement themselves as middle school teachers one day. – Carl Young (Survey)

~ I love the notion of revision. A personal wiki were your just using it to store information in your field, its amazing because you can keep changing things. You can update things. You have categories, you have a special index you can create that helps you navigate. So it is a great way to keep a compendium of material as long as you’re good at code. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

~ I think the goal of having students use the wiki as a repository of knowledge for their ongoing research was misguided. Just because, and in another class I might not have found this to be the case, but these folks dealt a lot with technology and they have found ways, different types of storage systems of their own that they prefer. So my asking them, my setting up a space and expecting them to use it for that function was misguided. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

~ "The wiki allows allows multiple collaborators who are separated by physical space to collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into a collective digital space. Researchers can also use the space to store draft files for their papers: MS Word, LaTEX, or even writing directly into the Web pages of the wiki. Additionally, funders and junior researchers can be given "read only" access to all or certain parts of the space." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

• Multimodal literacy (ML)

~ Another goal is the importance of developing multimodal literacy, including technology resources, and looking for ways to implement and apply technology resources in the classroom--effectively! Exploration and experimentation too! – Carl Young (Survey)

I think it is crucial. They are not keeping up if they are not reading the literature on multimodal communication and not thinking about how it fits into their own lives. If we are preparing students in higher education to go across to courses in other curriculums, they are going to rapidly come into areas were they contact other modalities, in presentation. Now in the sciences we see sessions where there are two computers and people have to know how to navigate this stuff as they are moving past the posters. Oral presentations that are increasingly supplemented by visuals that are no longer just power-points are also growing. There are little clips or pictures. If we are preparing students for those settings, then we have a lot more to do than having them right essays. The question is how much and what does it look like. So that’s one. Do teachers have an obligation? Yes, that is how writing is working now. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

o Linking (LINK) ~ The other, maybe greater, benefit is that one can build wiki webs in seconds. When students use wiki they rarely create just one page. The build links, often to staging pages at first, Then to other information for their project and those often get linked to an index page of that student's work that becomes a homepage, and then they link to their friends, and then.... it goes on and on. That process of webbing opens up so much more when it comes to really talking about composing and getting students to think about the plurifunctional ways a text can operate in various contexts. That where the return is for me. – Dayna Goldstein

~For creating a porfolio they are great, and you can teach them something about managing a large network of links; since linking and pagemaking is so easy with a wiki, the number of links can quickly grow unmanageable unless you have some architecture in place from the beginning. – Marc Pietrzykowski

~ From what I have seen with wiki, the main wiki tends to be pretty textual. Because there are links, you can link to other web pages that might not be. I just have not seen any wikis that are . . . the difference to me between the encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, which is replacing it, is that I have not seen the level of visual imagery in wikis. They just don’t allow more than primarily text links. It supports multimedia in a good way in that you start with a primarily textual representation that allows you to secondarily find other media. – Charles Jarod (Interview)

~ If students do not know how to create a website, then wikis are easier. It is easy to create links; the question is whether they know how to create links. It is a different kind of multimodality than a webpage that would have both images and text. I have seen it primarily as a textual medium with a secondary set of links to other things that open up. Maybe that will change and wikis will become more multimodal. That is an easy way for students to begin experimenting with multimedia – Charles Jarod (Interview)