Wikis and Literacy Development (Literacy Links‪)‬

I recently visited a colleague's school library and observed several groups of grade 5 students busily scanning and taking notes from different volumes of print encyclopedias. The teacher-librarian and I struck up a conversation about the students' projects, and I inquired if they would be gathering information from online sources such as Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Without hesitation, she answered no, explaining that she thought that Wikipedia was too difficult for many of her readers, that some of the information in it was questionable, and that the students did not have access to enough computers that were connected to the Internet. This and the next Literacy Links column reviews my concerns and explores the question, Can wikis be valuable resources for developing strong literacy links between the school library and the classroom? For those who are new to the term, a wiki is a collaborative web space housing a collection of works (textual and multimedia) created and edited by many authors. What makes a wiki unique is that it runs software that permits visitors to add new information and, more important, edit previous authors' submissions. In contrast, a blog typically allows visitors to post responses to previous authors' submissions--that is, visitors cannot go back and edit earlier blog submissions. In short, wikis are composed of recursive or editable web pages whereas blogs are composed of salient or uneditable web pages. See Davis (2006) and Dodge (2004) for more information on the differences between blogs and wikis.