Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Brian

This article from the journal Language and Learning Technology looks at blogs and wikis specifically from the perspective of language learning, though its key points are fairly universal. The abstract:

Language professionals have embraced the world of collaborative opportunities the Internet has introduced. Many tools — e-mail, discussion forums, chat — are by now familiar to many language teachers. Recent innovations — blogs, wikis and RSS feeds — may be less familiar but offer powerful opportunities for online collaboration for both language professionals and learners. The underlying technology of the new tools is XML (“extensible markup language”) which separates content from formatting, encourages use of meta-data, and enables machine processing of Internet documents. The latter is key in the ability to link automatically disparate documents of interest to individuals or groups. The new collaborative opportunities this enables have led some to consider the growing importance of XML as the signal of the arrival of the second-generation Web.

By Bob Godwin-Jones.

Via carvingCode, via [alterego]

About Brian

I am a Strategist and Discoordinator with UBC's Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. My main blogging space is Abject Learning, and I sporadically update a short bio with publications and presentations over there as well...
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3 Responses to Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration

  1. Gunnar Langemark says:
    May 5, 2003 at 11:54 pm

    You might want to take a look at Drupal (www.drupal.org)

  2. David Mattison says:
    May 9, 2003 at 9:55 pm

    Suggest you check out my article “QuickiWiki, Swiki, TWiki, ZWiki and the Plone Wars: Wiki as PIM and Collaborative Content Tool”, Searcher (April 2003), http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml

    This will give you a better picture of wikis and will confirm that blogs and wikis are headed for convergence — it’s already happened in some applications. Of course then there are also all sorts of other interesting open source “LAMP”-based collaborative content applications such as CIRCA from the European Union.

    What boggles my mind is how many bloggers, who should know better since they seem to be on the cutting edge of technology, consistently ignore the potential of wikis and basically want to reinvent the wheel. Plone is a good example of a Zope-based collaborative CMS that incorporates a wiki.

    My 2 cents ….

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