I'm not really sure how a wiki totally differs from docs word, because in both, as I understand it, you can interact with the document in a collaborative way. From the tutorial, however, it does look like a wiki can be easier to use and has greater flexibility, having been developed for collaboration, whereas word was not. There were two wikis that I thought were especially powerful. The first, from a professional point of view, was the Hanalee Book wiki. What they started out to do was develop, as a class, the whole picture that the book was trying to depict. So when Hanalee went from Georgia to Indiana to work in a mill during the Civil War, their intent was to describe the mill, the soldier's vocabulary, etc. Unfortunately, the wiki outline never got much past the chapter summaries much less completed, probably due to time constraints. I would imagine, in the classroom environment, this is a typical obstacle. There is so much to do and so little time to do it.
The second wiki that I thought was really neat, one that I want to share with my husband, is wikiHow. What a clever use of the collaborative concept. It's a live how to fix it log.
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You have a decent instinct about the difference between Google Docs and wikis. Wikis are collaborative work spaces or websites. This means you can add other content- widgets, slide shows, etc., that you could not in a document. This allows for groups to become more creative in their approaches to a final product. Imagine writing about James Joyce and being able to add sounds and images to illustrate your impression of Stephen Dedalus or Edna Pontellier?
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