 Today, Dr. Meha gave a presentation about wiki in education. First of all, we'll ask her to introduce herself. I'm Meha Lili Sharif. I'm assistant professor of methods of teaching and curriculum from the Qatar University. At the beginning, what's the meaning of wiki? Wiki is very simple. It's a web page or a collection of web pages or you can call it a website that more than one person can access and they can add or edit information to it, remove information to it and that is accessible to people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's free and it can also be very, very, very useful as an educational tool. How can you speak more about how we can use wiki in education? Yeah, that's right. The wiki has very strong, powerful tools or features that make it a useful educational tool. For example, it allows for collaborative authoring, which means that more than one person can collaborate to write something together, to write a story, to write a project, to write any kind of assignments given by the teacher. But they collaborate and cooperate in producing the end product. The other feature which is very interesting with wiki is that it has a history feature. So when a teacher or student submits anything on the website, the teacher can go ahead and edit their information or check that what they have contributed is really, they have made it themselves. It wasn't contributed by other people. If in any case the wiki is abused of or inappropriate information is posted on the wiki, the teacher can go ahead and remove whatever inappropriate posting has been made on the wiki. Basically, this is what it is. It's allowing for the implementation of the principles of student-centeredness or student learning, where the focus is on students rather than the teacher, where students can produce and contribute to the wiki. They're not just sitting there waiting for information to be submitted to them by the teacher. They can themselves add and contribute to the wiki. How can wiki be used in ESL classroom? Well, there are different ways. There are so many ways. In the presentation I talked of 30 ways. I cannot remember all of them. But it can be used as a resource by the teacher, where the teacher can, for example, use it to post a bank of assignments, a bank of activities, classroom activities. It can be used as a bank of tests to be reviewed by the students. Students can go on the wiki and interact with each other. There's a lot of peer interaction that can be fostered through the use of collaborative editing and collaborative authoring. So students post their information and they can ask other students to give feedback on what they have posted. The feedback can be on the content, but they can also edit the information that has been posted so students can give feedback on the writing, correcting their each other's writing. And by so doing there's a lot of learning that takes place. In other occasions the wiki can be used as for collaboration between classes or interaction between classes. So classes share information with each other, especially if a teacher is teaching two classes. She can ask students from one class to post information about a topic that is discussed in the class that can be shared by other students. Many other things can be done. I mean the wiki can be a place where to post a class calendar, where students post their important information and important dates. They can post forums of discussion about topics they like to discuss. They can make web quests on the wiki. They can do shared projects on the wiki. The wiki can also be used as a way to, as problem solving issues. For example a teacher can post a problem and groups of students can work on the problem to solve it and there can be a competition between groups to find out which group has managed to solve the problem the first. The teacher can also post information, especially I'm thinking of ESL context here in EFL. They can post documents which are riddled with mistakes and ask students to correct the mistakes and students do not need to do that individually. They can work in groups or in pairs to find out the mistakes and correct them. There's a lot of learning going on in that area. Giving feedback. Feedback is also, it's not just coming from the teacher, but it's peer feedback. This is another principle of student learner or student learning approaches where students give feedback to each other on how they are learning, on what they are learning and how to improve their learning. It doesn't have to be just from the teacher. The wiki is safe for students? Wikis might be made safe to the students, yes. One way to make wikis safe is that to have the teacher allow only certain members to contribute to the wiki. This can be done through the invitation process so the teacher can invite the members who will be allowed to write on the wiki or to contribute to the wiki. Others might be able to see the wiki, to access it, but they won't be able to sign in and post information on the wiki. By doing so, the teacher makes sure that only information that she allows to be posted is really posted. The teacher can also keep track of what is being posted because of that history function that allows to see who posted what. The teacher can remove inappropriate information and make sure that abuses of the wiki do not happen. Other students in the classroom can be made responsible for watching what other their classmates post on the wikis. Another way to protect students is by allowing them to use initials only or studio names, not using their own names, not disclosing their own personal identity. Because students are not, it's not necessary for them to use their emails, this is one more way to protect them. When a teacher builds up her wiki, there is a function that allows her to choose the kind of wikis, whether to make it private, protected, or to make it public. So the teacher will choose a function to ensure that the wiki is protected to ensure safety for students. As an educational tool, what's the difference between wiki and Kinet or Blackboard? The basic function or the major advantage I can see of the wiki is the fact of engaging students in collaboration and cooperation. I see Kinet and Blackboard as mainly course management tools that are efficient for the teachers to post the content of their courses, to post assignments to students, but students do not really have that opportunity of collaborating together, of interacting together, of giving feedback on each other's work and on each other's contributions, which are features of the wiki. It's a little bit of a hobby.