Why is a wiki more open than WebCT?
In brief, WebCT is a commercial product but the wiki software, WikiMedia, is not. That suggests that for the foreseeable future WebCT is likely to remain more expensive than WikiMedia, and to offer less accessibility to the software’s underlying computer code. The general spirit of WikiMedia is openness (the programming code is free and transparent as is the product it creates). This is supposed to lead to stronger community spirit in the “user world” and, hopefully, in classrooms. Many of us have tried to emphasize “peer learning”, “community pedagogy”, “active learning”, and so forth. WikiMedia is a tool to help facilitate those practices. Here is the Wikipedia page that describes the “Open Source Movement”.
