Uses+and+advantages+of+wikis

Wikis are among the myriad of web applications that allow users to share and produce contents. Bitter & Legacy (2006, p.76) state that wikis "are Internet websites that are designed for web-based collaboration." It is well-known that the best example of a wiki is the wikipedia (see []) which has attempted to store the "sum of human knowledge" (Richardson, 2010, p. 55), just like a paper-based encyclopedia, but with a major difference: that this encyclopedia is built on a collaborative basis by millions of people around the world. This has caused an enormous breakthrough in terms of how knowledge is shared, negotiated and constructed. It also has implications for the concept of authorship which, until recently, was thought of as a task of a couple of people, not a community of writers and readers. Wikipedia as well as some other wikis have fulfilled the important task of democratizing or making knowledge available to readers who have access to the web. People have used them in several ways and for several purposes. Some wikis have been used for entertaining (hobbies), for social purposes (news reports or political discussions) and business's purposes. However, from our point of view, one of the areas where wikis have had ramifications is education. All areas of the curriculum can take advantage of the functionalities of wikis. For instance, in a social studies class students can be encouraged to work collaboratively in projects that will allow them to see history from another perspective. Thus, students can post video clips, pictures and write summaries that will aid them in the understanding of certain topics. Questions or controversial issues can be brought to the fore so that participants can engage in dialogue; this can be done through the 'Discussion' function found in most wikis. One of the greatest advances of the web, which constitutes one of the features of wikis, is their multimodal nature. Different scholars such as Kress & van Leeuwen, Martinec, O'Halloran among others have pointed out the changes that multimodal texts have brought about to the current communication landscape. If we think of education some years ago, we can observe that communication was in most of the cases quite monomodal or restricted in regards to the mods of communication employed. The written and oral modes of communication dominated education for a lot of time, and even human history has been dominated by these modes. In contrast to this, the upcoming of the Internet and the web has licensed the meaningful integration of other modes of communication such as sound, color, image, design, hiperlinks and video among others, in the construction of messages or the process of meaning-making. In other words, the facilities afforded by the web have facilitated the development of multimodal communication, that is, the use of various modes of communication that together contribute to convey certain meaning or message. Going back to how this has impacted education; it can be seen that now students are provided with a wealth of modes to express their thoughts and build knowledge. By appealing to different modes (video, written language, sound image, etc.), students are given the chance to approach learning from their learning styles and multiple intelligences. This strength is clearly found in wikis where, as mentioned above, permit the integration and use of various communication modes. By and large, wikis not only perform a socialization function but also insert students in the current communication dynamics where meaning making and reception are highly multimodal.
 * Some notes about wikis and their impact on education and communication **
 * References**:

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for classroom. USA: Corwin.

Bitter, G. & Legacy, J. (2006). Using technology in the classroom. USA: Pearson education.

//José A. Álvarez V.//