For years, I have accepted email attachement homework and even taught students how to make their own webpages so that the class could share their work online. But the difficulty in truely sharing the same online work enviroment has started to become frustrating. I had to be the central collection point of information that I would post on a class website. This took a lot of "low level thinking" on my behalf, as well as from my students.
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Why wiki ?

I am currently using a wiki in my reading class to develop a class vocabulary list (that I personally don't have to update every day) as well as a character list for the novel we are reading and a collaborative background project space. Having the students do the online web updates gives them power over class events and saves me adminstrative time. These are pretty good reasons to use a class wiki.
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Another reason I turned to a class wiki is a book review I recently wrote for LLT. Several chapters in the book present evidence that the use of instructional technology fosters a student-centered, constructivist learning enviroment, which is certainly the desired type of learning enviroment for a language learning class. Additionally, students (now part of a generation of "digital natives") preceive faculty who use technology as more concerned with their students (Arnold & Ducate, 2006, p. 12).