Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Katrina Fulcher-Rood. I’m an assistant professor and at the Speech-Language Pathology Department at SUNY Buffalo State.
Essentially, Blogs and Wikis are websites that are collaborative in design and purpose. They’re often free – and make online writing, discussion and publishing quick and easy.
With a wiki, “collaborators” add content while “administrators” take down or revise content when necessary. Wikis are frequently used as repositories for information. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a Wiki.
Blogs allow a user or users with the proper permissions to post, change, and remove content. Some Blogs are collaborative, but many are the mouthpieces of their creators. “Bloggers” broadcast, while their readers comment on what has been posted.
Blogs and Wikis both use a “WYSIWYG” publishing toolbar to simplify publishing which means “what you see is what you get”. This simplifies publishing and encourages users to participate.
Blogs and wikis allow people with proper permissions to update and revise content. They also allow changes to be tracked, page versions reinstated, and content deleted as desired.
Because contributions can be tracked, feedback on individual contributions can be provided.
This feature might be especially attractive to educators.
In his “2 Cents Worth Blog,” David Warlick wrote: “Weblogs are about reading and writing. Literacy is about reading and writing. Blogging equals literacy. How rarely does an aspect of how we live and work plug so perfectly into how we teach and learn?”
Here are a few of the differences between blogs and wikis.
- Blogs are most often used for editorial text, while Wiki’s are most often collaborative and allow many people to collaboratively create and edit content.
- Blogs are most often opinion-based, while wikis most often serve as a knowledge base
- Blogs are a good choice for individual projects and wikis are great for group projects
Blogs and Wiki’s can vary wildly in their appearance, and it’s up to the host to decide what the site will look like.