The Washington Post has an interesting article about how many professors are increasingly using wikis in their courses as a way to facilitate interactivity with the material outside of the classroom. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know what a wiki is already, but if you don’t (and don’t feel bad if that’s the case), a wiki is like a collaborative blog or a way for many people to collaborate on a certain online project.

The best example of a wiki is Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia where anyone can post or modify an entry (after their post is reviewed and approved by editors). In fact, Wired Magazine just did a feature story about Wikipedia. Some excerpts from the Washington Post article:

“Students keep pushing for more interactivity, often in ways I hadn’t thought of yet,” said Mark L. Phillipson, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Phillipson’s students can go to a wiki he designed and highlight a phrase in a poem such as John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” From “tender is the night,” for example, they could create links to their own essays, a scanned image of the ink-blotted original manuscript, artwork, something about the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with that title -- anything.

Sometimes wikis don’t click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy in and out of topics with music, photos and video pulling readers along. One of Phillipson’s students drew a picture of a poem; another made a movie.

Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and questioning. Early e-mail lists, newsgroups and chat rooms were ephemeral, like a passing conversation, said Steve Jones, a communication professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Now computers and networks are fast enough that many people can share text, videos, sound and art and work on them together, he said, building a body of knowledge over time. Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they’re just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they’re popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.

The march of technology continues, transforming (or at least influencing) whole social institutions along the way, in this case education and higher learning. I just might have to figure out how to incorporate wikis and blogs into my own courses.