Four Letter Words - How wiki and edit are making the Internet a better teaching tool - Using Wiki in Education -
Chapter in a "wiki book" (2 chapters are free, others require payment for the book). The beginning of this chapter is a basic intro to wikis, but the graphics explaining the workflow are interesting. The author argues that when you work with wikis, you get all the logistic pieces out of the way early in the creative process, leaving more time for actual writing and collaboration. In practice, I think there are times when you have to address the logistics issues throughout the process, but it's greatly reduced with wikis.
<p>The above example demonstrates the power of the wiki to make collaboration more inclusive and knowledge construction efficient, distributed and fast. If you think about this visually, the email/Word scenario has limited periods of creativity separated by the logistical and socially sensitive task of combining edits:</p>
<p></p><div align="center"><img src="/download/attachments/54/ch1-lowproductivetime.jpg" border="0"></div><p></p>
<p>The wiki completely changes this by shifting logistics to the shortest possible segment of time at the outset, leaving a much greater period of time for collaborative creativity and knowledge construction:</p>
<p></p><div align="center"><img src="/download/attachments/54/ch1-highproductivetime.jpg" border="0"></div>