Wikis work: Enhancing student engagement with collaborative technology

This paper documents experiences using a wiki in teaching large undergraduate classes. A wiki is a web-based tool used to enhance student engagement and collaboration. This paper presents experiences using wikis as the major term assignment/or two senior classes; one in human geography, the other in earth sciences. The advantages of using wiki technology are examined, as well as some of the challenges presented, including evaluation. While some of these challenges were significant, the experiments were successful enough to warrant further use. The paper concludes with some recommendations for others considering using wikis in their courses.