Wikis – Best Practices

References provided in Literature Section

• Set the tone right from the beginning, which means to let people know how to interact right from their first use of the wiki (eWEEK, 2007)
• Reward individual exceptional contributions even if these contributions are part of a required task or assignment (eWEEK, 2007)
• Organize the structure of your information in a simple way which makes it easy for adding or editing content (eWEEK, 2007)
• Integrate your wiki with your database so that your users will be able to create their own wiki dashboards for their daily activities (eWEEK, 2007)
• Security is essential and specifying permissions is important even at the individual page levels (eWEEK, 2007)
• Let wiki adoption grow rapidly where users send wiki links to other people in the organization or by emailing wiki pages which will make other people interested to participate (eWEEK, 2007)
• Include participation in a wiki as a mean of assessment which can enhance students’ participation (Neumann & Hood, 2009)
• Engage students in non-graded exercises to become familiar with the system as most learners are not familiar with it when they use it for the first time (Twu, 2009)
• Explain to the students the value of using a wiki in the instruction and how it will help them especially with High-Context Culture students (HCC) (Twu, 2009)
• Support harmony in social interaction so students don’t take offense when their posts are edited (Twu, 2009)
• Identify true identities of students and avoid anonymous identities (Twu, 2009)
• Encourage positive social relationships (Twu, 2009)
• Incorporate different social network applications such as Facebook, Myspace, and Ning (Twu, 2009)
• Encourage students to incorporate other web 2.0 tools to create their own Personal Management Environments (PMEs) (Twu, 2009)
• Build and facilitate online collaboration though communities (Twu, 2009)
• Allow time for students acclimate to a wiki environment before expecting them to build wiki communities (Twu, 2009)