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What Suzanne expected and got

Page history last edited by Derek Van Ittersum 14 years, 8 months ago

I bought right into the hype that the wiki would bring community and enhanced learning to our English 101/College Writing, Wright-DePaul Bridge course team-taught with Peggy St. John. The wiki originally was meant to provide a communication tool, much like Blackboard, for both sets of students, as the Blackboard systems are not compatible. My experience with Blackboard was that it was quite rigid and seemed institutional. But according to most of the current research I have read, wikis were revolutionary. They were fluid, user-friendly, flexible and collaborative. Therefore, I envisioned much more from wikis. I imagined pithy and erudite conversations at least weekly on the wiki. I imagined these conversations would carry over into the classroom. Looking back, perhaps I expected too much too soon. While our initial experience using the wiki did not revolutionize our pedagogy, subsequent experience has shown that wikis in the classroom can be a part of solid continuing conversations, thus giving students (and instructors) an opportunity to further hone critical thinking skills.

 

That said, although Peggy and I did not have the life-changing experience touted by much current research, participation on the wiki was not disappointing, especially considering that not every student will embrace a new or different technology. As mentioned, students often seem to want to focus on the core of the course, not on many added elements that they may deem simply as "extra." In addition, neither Peggy nor I had previous experience using a wiki in the classroom. Moreover, neither of us had used discussion forums in any extended way in the physical classroom.

 

Therefore, our wiki became more of a tool, so to speak, for both us instructors and for the students. Students posted homework discussion questions. Peggy and I posted information. Some students, of course, were more involved with the wiki than others. One student even created a page just for chatting. Another took ownership of a page that Peggy and I created for arranging carpooling to a production of The Crucible that our students were attending at the Steppenwolf Theater. This page exemplified more of what I wanted from using the wiki in the classroom--student engagement on several levels.

 

The biggest test was probably a collaborative assignment. Students were to use the wiki as their main communication mode so that their participation in the project would be transparent to Peggy and me. Some groups, of course, did better than others. The group that created the best collaborative essay used the wiki most extensively to work on the project. The group members communicated quite extensively, through short questions and answers, and posted drafts of their essay on the wiki. Moreover, they posted several iterations and different sections of the collaborative project so that each member could comment and edit. In this way, the students were taking advantage of the flexibility and opportunities to share ideas that wikis afford. Of course, correlation and causation are not the same, but this group exhibited cooperation and collegiality on the wiki.

 

Other groups’ communication on the wiki did transfer to the classroom as well, creating a more communal feel overall. Peggy and I were pleased to hear students discussing items they had posted on the wiki and finding solutions to glitches they encountered.

 

Again, we cannot be sure if the impressive insight our students showed during in-class discussions was because they had posted thoughts previously on the wiki, but we did have sharp discussions.

 

Overall, it worked and it worked well. It was easy for us as instructors and the students found it user-friendly, as well. This semester, however, we used the wiki much less, likely for a few reasons. First, it was optional. We had good intentions. We posted our syllabus and a welcome and we had students post initially. But we were not committed to it, and this could also be because we had a shorter term (10 weeks instead of 12) and a more intense, research-paper writing class. We wanted our students mainly to write drafts for their papers outside of class, and we discussed lessons in class.

 

Of course, we could have used the wiki for draft submission, but email seemed much less complicated and more private.

 

In addition, most of our students in the Winter/Spring 2008 class were from our Fall 2007 class, so the community was already created.

 

We saw a bit more interest when we used a wiki for our Fall 2008 English 101/Academic Writing for Adults class. I would attribute this to the fact that both Peggy and I were a bit more comfortable using the wiki and had found some more ways to use it in the classroom. For example, I had used a wiki in other classes and had developed a few wiki-only assignments. But likely more important was that we had students who were not only tech-savvy but interested in using the wiki as a community-building tool. For example, for the first time, some students (and both instructors) uploaded avatars, which created user identities on the wiki, which, in turn, allows users to take more ownership of what they post. One student also had previously taken classes with both Peggy and me and Polly and Michelle and served as somewhat of a spokesman for the usefulness of wikis. These experiences correlated with some of the findings in the available research on wikis. The wiki was another way to make the class a little more streamlined for students.

 

Another by-product of using wikis was seeing the positive results a colleague saw in his classes during Fall 2008. This colleague, who also teaches English at Wright College, is unable to use Blackboard because of an unresolved administrative privileges issue. I showed him how to set up a wiki, and he used them in each of his four classes, one of which was a 50/50 hybrid course. He found the platform easy to use and navigate, posted assignments and resources, and took advantage of opportunities to use more graphic elements, which Peggy and I did little of. For example, he posted links to videos for his students to view and comment on and embedded public domain images and freeware. His students treated the wikis much like they treat platforms such as Facebook, posting stream-of-consciousnessness updates on their research and posing questions. This poses many interesting questions, as this colleague's students were more traditional college-age and daytime students, who likely engage in more online social networking, as opposed to more of our students, who are often older and working during the day (and therefore often unable to access online networking sites).

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