Jen Millea @ education.au

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the US intelligence community is using a wiki to compile intelligence information. Given the multitude of organisations and individuals who gather intelligence in the US - and world-wide - the idea of a collaboratively developed, up-to-the minute, online ‘Intellipedia’ makes great sense.

Wikis are a great model for collaborative authorship - they are relatively simple to use, don’t require knowledge of HTML and authors are able to instantly update, add to, modify and correct information.

Wiki software also frequently provides a versioning system so you can find out who changed what and how.

In education, wikis are used as a tool for collaborative writing and for team-based activities. From an assessment point of view wikis can be useful because of the track-back ability to see who made what contribution, rather than relying on members of the team to accurately self report.

Wikis also reflect the changing nature of both the times and the models of teaching and learning. A wiki supports the collaborative construction of knowledge through shared activities, rather than the delivery of a product which is the output of a individual student based on their independent research.

education.au’s recent Global Summit, held in Sydney, Australia, used wikis to collect and distil the discussions had by the groups of educators. This enabled the thinking and ideas generated to live on subsequent to the event.

Many community software packages now include a wiki function as part of the tools available. For example, Moodle the free open source learning management system includes one. (edna Groups, managed by education.au, provides Moodle as a free service for communication and collaboration between members of the Australian education and training community.)

But wikis are not for those who care about crafting their sentences and styling their prose - not when anyone can come along and do their own crafting over the top of yours.

In some cases, wikis can become battlegrounds of ideology as one person or group struggles with another to have their interpretation of the facts published. And as one version supercedes another, a wiki can become a Ground Hog day for its contributors publishing their ‘correct’ content over and over.

Combined with other online tools such as blogs, discussion lists and web forums students can experience both robust debate with their peers and the opportunity to contribute to the development of shared knowledge and understanding by publishing as a community - a powerful and engaging combination.

Wikipedia, for example, has thousands of contributors and more than one million articles in English.

For the intelligent people who decided to support the Intellipedia for intelligence gathering, the use of a wiki as the tool is likely to improve both the accuracy of the intelligence available - because of the ability of many to contribute their specific piece of knowledge - and the diversity of the intelligence available. Filtering out facts that don’t fit becomes more difficult when everyone is able to contribute and comment.