Wikis or blogs?

Wikis or blogs? 

After experiencing first-hand how blogs and wikis work, I feel there are some positive and negative aspects that should be mentioned. 

From a general point of view, I think some advantages they both share are: they are free and virtual (so it may encourage people to create one or participate); they are useful tools to help us make use of technologies in a deep way; and they provide people with information and allow them to share their thoughts or doubts, so they can communicate. However, a disadvantage would be that, like any other virtual element, there is always a risk of hacking. 

Now, if we analyse them from an educational perspective, we can see that blogs and wikis help students develop their creativity because they play an active role, they are the ones in charge of the blog or the wiki, so the care of them depends on them. Also, in these blogs and wikis they can work in groups, so they learn to collaborate and they can understand their classmates’ viewpoints thanks to the possible discussions and debates that can take place. Nevertheless, if students are not responsible, the blogs or wikis will inevitably fail. In addition, I believe some students might not feel motivated because they think the best way to learn is in class, physically, with the teacher, not virtually. 

Now I’m going to talk about wikis and blogs separately:

With respect to wikis, I really love the fact that we can create different pages with several and distinct information in a very ordered and organized way. Actually, people can find the section they want to look at very easily. In our case, in our wiki Learningenglishisfun3, each of us have a page and there are some others for different aspects: second life, research questions, comments and doubts, etc. Moreover, they are very easy to update. Although I have been dealing with wikis for a few time, I have come to like it so much. In fact, one of the reasons why I like it is the fact that it is rather easy to use (and this is quite important especially for people qho are bad at technologies like me).

Regarding blogs, I hate their structure; that is, for instance, when a blog has several entries, you can spend ages trying to find the one you are interested in (contrary to what happens with wikis). Blogs are also easy to employ, but in comparison to wikis, I find them more difficult to invite people to become members/editors of the blog.

Finally, now that I know the wikis, I prefer them to blogs because they are more practical and even simple, though elaborated at the same time. I would also like to mention that I would use wikis in work group, whereas I feel blogs should be used individually.

P.S.-Here you have a video about wikis and blogs where we are provided with some tips and information.