К.ф.н., доцент Тасанбаева З.Р., магистрант Баетова А.С.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет, Казахстан

EDUCATIONAL WIKI AS A CONTENT COLLABORATION AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Ward Cunningham, the man behind the very first wiki, described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. But, unfortunately, it is not very descriptive, and to be honest, not entirely accurate. A better description would be - a wiki is the simplest collaborative content management system that could possibly work.

To understand a wiki, you must understand the idea of a content management system. As complicated as the name might sound, content management system is really quite a simple concept. Imagine you are the editor of a newspaper and it is your duty to get the newspaper out the door every day. Each day the articles in the newspaper are going to change. One day, a mayor might be elected, the next day, a high school football team wins the state championship, and the next day, a fire destroys two buildings downtown.

So, every day you have to put new content into the newspaper. However, much of the newspaper also stays the same. The name of the newspaper, for example. And, while the date might change, it is going to be the same date on every page for that issue of the newspaper. Now, imagine if you had to type in the name of the newspaper on every page each day. And you had to type in the date under it. You had to manually configure those columns. As an editor, you might find yourself with so much work that you don't have time to actually put the good stuff - the articles - into the newspaper because you are too busy typing in the name of the newspaper over and over again. So, instead, you buy a software program that will let you create a template for the newspaper. This template puts the name at the top of the page, and lets you type in the date a single time and then copies it to each page. It will keep track of page numbers for you, and will even help you format the pages into two columns or three columns with a click of a button. That is a content management system.

The web works the same way. If you notice, most websites are similar to your newspaper. The name of the website and the menu for navigating through it tend to stay the same while the actual content changes from page to page.

Sometimes, an editor might go over the article to make some correction, but it usually doesn't go much further than that.

It is the collaborative effort that makes wikis so great. That is what makes a wiki tick. It pools together the knowledge of a group of people to create the best possible resource. So, in effect, an article becomes the sum of knowledge of the people who worked on the article. The end result is that we'd be reading a much better article.

And that is the beauty of wikis. Through a collaborative effort, we are able to create a resource that is superior to anything that we could have accomplished alone.

So what is it? It's a book. And, usually, it's a reference book, like your dictionary or encyclopedia. Since it is in web form, you use a search box rather than a table of contents. And, from any single article, you might be able to jump to several new subjects. So, instead of flipping back and forth in a book to get the whole story, you can just follow the links.

A wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be rolled back if necessary.

The wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person’s course web site.

To the ways to use Wiki in education we can refer the following:

· Easily create simple websites

· Project development with peer review

· Group authoring

· Track a group project

· Data Collection

· Review classes & teachers

· Presentations

· Tracking progress in your research group

Литература

1. Using Wiki in Education. The Science of Spectroscopy www.scienceofspectroscopy.info/edit/index.php?title=Using_wiki_in_education