A few weeks ago I was giving a talk to teachers on the implications of technology on teaching. At the end of the talk a fellow trainer came up and raised the issue of reading skills in the Internet age, something I had alluded to in the talk. He asked if I’d heard of wiki wars on youtube and explained how it could be a useful thing to do in the class to develop scanning and skimming skills.
A quick youtube search later and I knew fully what he was on about. Not only that a google search turned up the rules. As the trainer had mentioned, this indeed could be a fun and useful ELT activity. It can be done on Internet mobile devices or laptops. There are a couple of nice apps that allow Idevice users to easily access wikipedia. Wikimobile is the official wikipedia app and wikipanion an easy to use way of searching wikipedia.
Playing wiki wars in class can promote a number of things. First of all, working in groups with one device per group leads to collboration. Deciding on the best way from A to B promotes conversation and critical thinking as the student. Likewise after the event the groups can analyse the choices they made and why their route worked / didn't work. Then of course there is the competitve element introduced by getting from to A to B in the quickest way, promoting scanning and skimming.
If you only have one device then most of this still applies assuming you have it attached to a larger screen.
A few days after discovering this, I found an app called the wiki game
