A wiki is a collection of websites that is openly accessible for viewing and can be edited by anyone or by selected individuals. The term comes from the Hawaiian phrase "wiki wiki" meaning "rapidly." A wiki allows instructors to create collaborative writing assignments. A group of students can work together on a writing assignment and then publish that assignment to the web by using the wiki. Additionally, wikis keep a history of the updates so the members of the team and the instructor can see who has contributed to the assignment. Baylor's Blackboard wiki is called Teams LX.
A blog, the commonly accepted abbreviation of Weblog, is a web site that is updated on a regular basis and structured in reverse chronological order so that the most recent information is listed first. Instructors use blogs as an instructional tool to encourage students to create journals of their thoughts, comments and philosophies. The blogging tool within Blackboard will allow students to have private blogs that only the individual student and the course instructor can read and edit as well as a more public blog that can be read by the entire class.
The Electronic Library is very excited to offer these tools to the Baylor academic community. We hope that these tools give faculty more options for class exercises while encouraging better writing and collaboration for our students in the online environment.