Despite my voting record, I’m basically a conservative. I like to change what I’m doing a little, but only a little, each quarter. Using the wiki while working with Polly pushed me out of my comfort zone of change-by-baby-steps. Yet, I found the wikis quite easy to work with and enjoyed using them.

When we moved to having students post their papers online, I was initially challenged about how to provide feedback since I usually use the comment function in Word. I didn’t like the effect of adding comments in the middle of a student’s writing, since it made everything hard to read and looked like I was hijacking their paper. At first, I switched to just giving students a summary comment at the end of their papers, but this felt insufficient. I learned to attach my commented upon Word version of their papers to a summary comment. Students who ignored the Word document did so to their peril.

I liked the effect of having a page on which students could see their successive drafts with comments. For a number of students, this tangible evidence of what they could do when they revised was a revelation. Although I was initially disappointed that students were not editing on the wikis, I have to confess that, for assessment purposes, it seemed easier to look at drafts posted one after another than to compare wiki page histories to see how the paper had developed. When one student did revise his paper on the wiki, I assumed he had not done a second draft because a quick glance at his page showed me only one version of his paper. That said, I most want students to take ownership of their papers, revising not because I assigned a new draft but because they want to. When they have a new idea or fifteen minutes to look over their paper, I want them to be comfortable editing on the wiki.

I found much of what I read about wikis to be over-the-top and untested. However, I thought the wikis worked extraordinarily well for the group handbook project both because students could collaborate and because Polly and I let students run the project on their own. I’d like to further explore the ways we might be able to use wikis to have students do textual analysis by putting up a text and then having them link to it as Farabaugh (2007) has done. I’d also like to use a wiki to have students generate and answer their own questions, though this could be done on a Blackboard also.

I'm excited about using wikis to show students whose idea of revision is often limited to changing a couple of words or adding some commas what they can do when they really return to their writing. In the past, I've handed out to students some of my old drafts after I've marked them up for revision. However, these papers only show one or two rounds of revision. Much more powerful will be to show students the history of a wiki text--then they can really see the messiness of the writing process Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007) describe. Once students see this mess is not a sign of failure, they will have more confidence to plunge into it with their own writing 

Since working with Polly, I keep trying to use wikis for committee work, with limited success. At our campus, faculty have so many different websites and portals to go to for different tasks that adding yet another is a challenge.

Despite all of this, I dragged my feet on setting up a wiki for a different class even though I can see how it will really be useful for students as a way to continue sharing information and supporting each other beyond the class. So, why the foot dragging? In part, because it is optional and the mandatory-due-yesterday tasks keep crowding out the optional, this-would-be-good-to-do tasks. Also, because I don’t have it all figured out, but when will I? As we show in Technology Transfer and Teacher Learning, it is through iteration that we feel our way.