Abstract:

The Web applications tend to integrate and transcend the text (hypertext), the means (multimedia), the stability (interactive) and the individuality (collaboration). These new applications will allow cutting down the distances between the classic technologies which are usually used in universities and other ways of using these technologies when students are outside the classroom. From all these technologies, the Wiki has been considered as one of the most academic tools among the Web 2.0 applications.
In this framework, GADIS (Teaching innovation Group on data and information in Health and Psychology management and analysis - http://www.uv.es/gadis/) has been developing during the last academic year the ForWiki project (improvement and adaptation of the training tools by means of the resource integration based on the Web 2.0 and taking into account a Wiki system, DOCENTIC program of the teaching innovation projects of the University of Valencia).
The experiment developed in the project shows the viability and utility to integrate several free resources of the Web 2.0 through several Wiki systems (http://apdap.wetpaint.com/, http://mensevi.wetpaint.com/, http://padat.wetpaint.com/, http://wikidocente.wetpaint.com/). Among the conclusions of the experiment, it is important to mention point out the following ones:
a) The challenges that have been raised by the Bologna plan for the University education imply a greater participation and practical work for the student or a more collaborative work from the professor. The resources of the Web 2.0 may have an important role as help in this sense.
b) Some experiments appear to be discouraging considering the lack of enthusiasm from the students in using the ICT’s with university learning, this happens with centralized systems where neither the easiness of use nor the possibility to interact that gives the Web 2.0 is available.
c) This work are the one that must and can inspire the development of the corporative systems of the universities, meant to help the professors when managing their teaching resources in “virtual classrooms”, beyond being systems that manage students, repositories and document downloads.
d) The use of open systems as the ones that have been used in this project allow exploring, in live situations, the real limits and advantages that would enable defining the basic utilities of a system that is adapted to our teaching reality, where we have to consider the tremendous diversity of styles and uses that the professors, but also the students, end up developing.
e) A wiki system appropriately combines versatility and usability to enable a set of professors to be able to maintain, in an integrated way, a set of teaching resources. They may be developed in the same editor as the wiki’s, integrating through links of embedded codes other materials developed with other systems (e.g. videos, presentations, collaborative documents, questionnaires...).
f) A wiki can be presented to a group of students as an integrator portal of teaching resources of different kinds, for its use in a non-classroom mode. The possibility of supporting a forum system by page turns out to be especially useful to integrate interaction among students and between them and professors.
g) It is also perfectly viable to use the wiki as a visual support to the narrative classes as a substitution to the classic presentations, showing some advantages, but disadvantages as well.

Keywords:

e-learning proposals, teaching-learning processes based on the new technologies and web services, net share and collaboration, Web 2.0, Wikis.