Uncovering the first wiki?

In class today we looked at an early pedagogical website called "The Victorian Web". This site explores Victorian literature, history and culture in a web-based setting. The version that exists today was developed in 1987 and was used in courses at Brown University, but the initial site was in fact quite different and in some ways much more interactive. The original design allowed students to edit and save the pages freely as they discovered further information on a sub-topic. Sound like a tool you might have used yourself on the web? Maybe a little something like Wikipedia? To me, this site was unknowingly an early prototype of a wiki. As early as 1987, when the first web pages were being launched, we saw one of the first versions of what we now commonly know to be wiki's. So why did it take until at least 1994 for wiki's to finally catch on with mainstream users?

If you think about it, computer-based pedagogy is fairly new. Heck, personal computers are fairly new. There is still so much to learn when we look at computing and using it as a tool for education. Like this particular example shows, maybe if we look to the past we can uncover a future for computers and education.