Wiki in Education2Wiki In Education: Addressing Cultural DiversityIn this new digital age of communication, the Internet has become a common playingfield for learning and exploration of most students today. In order to get the attention of moststudents, we as educators must speak the same digital language (Prensky 2001) as our students.Because information on the Internet is accessed the same from almost anywhere in the world,addressing cultural diversity while integrating this digital language and organization into our curriculum has become of utmost importance in order to assure that students understand and canfilter the vast amount information available to them. One platform that is playing an integral rolein bringing digital communities of the new age learners together to collaborate on a quest for knowledge is the use of a wiki. This paper will show how using a wiki in the classroom canaddress five dimensions of multicultural education (Banks, 2004b) and provide better ownership by students of their own knowledge.Wikipedia (2006) states that "a wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, andedit content. A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites, the first wiki(WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s. Wikis allow for linkingamong any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effectivetool for mass collaborative authoring. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is probably the best-known wiki."In exploring a model for a multicultural class it becomes apparent that the very nature of a wiki is congruent with James Banks (2006) dimensions of multicultural education. They are:content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure (Banks, 2006). Technical
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