Social Software in the Classroom: The Case of Wikis for Scaffolding

The concept of being online, today, connotes a social experience and social activity is increasingly mediated by (new) technologies and the Internet (Laffey & Amelung, 2010). As we integrate more tools and resources to scaffold students, we need to understand what works and what does not work in a classroom in the future. The simple flexible nature of wikis makes them a powerful tool for collaborative and cooperative work. As they are free online writing spaces where context can be created, edited, viewed, revised, tagged, publicized, assessed and commented upon, wikis may be used as a source of scaffolding.