Role of Wikis in School Education

The main agenda of this paper is to provide a review of literature on the role of Web 2.0 or social software tools particularly wikis in school education because it is an under-researched area. Though it is a versatile tool to leverage the information in multimodal environment, including video, sound, animation, as well as, static text and image it has not been actively used in the context of school education especially in the Indian context. Today’s educators are hesitant in using the web 2.0 technology because they feel overwhelmed by the range of choices it offers. The paper tries to evolve framework that can be employed to use wikis. It examines the issues that have surfaced from the review especially those that affect pedagogy due to adoption of web 2.0 technologies. The advantages of wikis to students, educators and institutions as well as the challenges that accompany such initiative and the host of problems that need to be addressed in using wikis in school education is enumerated. This paper incorporates the analysis out of the review and highlights the different pedagogical roles of web2.0 technologies with reference to communication, innovation, and collaborative learning and challenging the imagination of children. The analysis answers the concerns of academicians about the inclusion of web 2.0 technologies and the findings can influence learning and teaching strategies in various echelons of education. The paper integrates the perspective by consolidating a variety of literature sources from academic publications, recent Newspaper and magazine reports on social network sites and commentaries and views on social media itself. A major limitation of this paper is lack of empirical evidences in the Indian context for rigorous analysis and does not analyse the reason for this paradoxical situation.