Cloud Computing

Some institutions have made a full-scale commitment to the cloud in terms of educational opportunities, confiding a large portion of their students’ interactions to offsite group based tools and technologies. These often allow a wide variety of things to happen in class situations that our more primitive technologies won’t accommodate. One of the more interesting kinds of cloud based tools used by educators is the cooperative work application known as a wiki. Wikis are essentially cloud based authoring tools, in which all participants have an opportunity to edit the work in progress (while having their contributions tracked for accountability purposes) and work can proceed asynchronously. The best known version of this communications tool is of course the well-known Wikipedia; you can read about its own version of its own model here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki. It is a very interesting and widely applied tool, and clearly has implications for educational activities. You can probably find a variety of materials relating to the applications of wikis in education if you do some simple Google searching.