Current and Potential Uses of Wikis in the Teaching of Writing

From WolfWikis

Uses thus far that I have found (updated as I find and suggest more):

Class Collaboration

• Students post assignments
• Teacher/classmates have easy access to make comments and suggestions on assignments

• "The ability to edit others' texts" conveniently shouldn't be underestimated as a big step in teaching collaborative writing skills." - Miles Kimball

• Easy access for personal and social revision

1. Revision of personal student assignments
2. Revision of wiki
3. Revision of blog postings for clarification

• Access in or out of school for students
• Sense of community provided for those who contribute
• Sense of ownership for contributors

• "Wikis allow students to collaborate in a flexible environment they control and create themselves." - Miles Kimball

• Collaborative Knowledge Base

"In the more classic use of the wiki, groups can use the environment to create a shared knowledge base of information. This can be used to allow students to develop a project in small groups, to work on a small piece of a larger class project, or even to have students themselves create and maintain the course Web site." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

Class Website

"Wikis offer a powerful yet flexible collaborative communication tool for developing content-specific Web sites. Because wikis grow and evolve as a direct result of people adding material to the site, they can address a variety of pedagogical needs—student involvement, group activities, and so on. Since wikis reside on the Internet, students can access and participate from any location, provided they have Internet access." - 7 Things You Should Know About Wikis

• Teacher can explain and present the pedagogical place of wikis in writing and explain the ideological stance behind the wiki.

  • ". . .one cannot underestimate the importance of explaining the pedagogical and epistemological validity of wikis to students before implementing them in the classroom. There is a large difference between working in a massive wiki such as Wikipedia and a pbwiki within a classroom. Regardless, student writers often have strong opinions about participating in collaborative electronic writing formats, even if they don't express them upfront, which often break along the lines of foundational/anti-foundational knowledge producing schemes." - Robert Cummings

• Teacher can post new assignments for students to submit
• Teacher can create organic (naturally evolving) syllabus:

1. Assignment posts
2. Calendar (Due Dates, Holidays, etc.)
3. Grading Scale
4. Required Texts
5. Posting Grades (anonymously through social security number of come random class number assignment)

"I was also using the wiki to progressively post the course syllabus on pages that then gave me space to post daily notes (and let students post questions). The benefit of this last use was that students could (anonymously or with names attached) put up questions that they knew would be right in front of my face as I was adding my own notes to cover in class. Sort of a collaborative Power Point presentation. In short, I’ve found wikis to be useful because (1) they support a variety of purposes and (2) they’re scalable—that is, you can use them a little or a lot, and I’ve had success with a range of small-to-big functions." - Jay Jordan

• Evaluation of student assignments
• Discussion Board (blog, etc.)

"The professors argue that the communal Web sites promote a more casual, flexible form of class discussion than blogs and message boards.

And some campus wiki enthusiasts are making the case that the technology can actually change students' writing for the better, by encouraging them to swap ideas with their classmates and to continually revise their work, instead of turning in a paper and forgetting it forever." Brock Read

Research

• Research Coordination and Collaboration

"The wiki allows allows multiple collaborators who are separated by physical space to collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into a collective digital space. Researchers can also use the space to store draft files for their papers: MS Word, LaTEX, or even writing directly into the Web pages of the wiki. Additionally, funders and junior researchers can be given "read only" access to all or certain parts of the space." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

• All research is centrally available.

Individual Notepad/Journal

• Students could create individual pages on which to create, edit, revise, and organize writing assignments.
• Student Journaling

"Instructors want students to journal for a number of reasons: to demonstrate writing proficiency, to expose understanding (and misunderstanding) of conceptual knowledge, to establish the habit of regular reflection, and to engage in meta-cognitive reflection, to name a few. The wiki allows students to journal for their own benefit, or for peer or instructor review." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

"In order to successfully write in a wiki, students need the ability to pre-write in a traditional environment, to journal and gather ideas in a format where only the author, or perhaps the author and the writing teacher, are the only readers." (109) - Bob Cummings

• Easily linked to other pages and articles for reference
• Key words can be defined, highlighted, or even given their own page
• Contacts, email, dates, and other important information is localized centrally for each student on is or her own page.

Personal Portfolio

• Students can create a online personal biography or cirriculum vita.
  • Professional vita or resume.

"By enabling students to collect and organize digital assets such as course notes, images,web resources, and PowrPoint slides, the wiki can help learners to make connections between and among those assets." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

"I've been piloting a "wiki-portfolio" in a Tech Comm course. The course software we usually use unifies work by assignment; so you see the full set of Paper #1. The wiki setup provides a space for each student; so you see all of their work, and all of your responses, in one space, a complete portfolio incrementally assembled over the course of the term." – Donald Unger

". . . the portfolio not only allows the student to reassemble the work in a meaningful narrative for presentation to audiences outside the composition classroom but the reflective practices it occasions also allows student writers to apply critical thinking skills in assessing their own work as a meta-reinforcement of the overall goals of the composition classroom." (136) Bob Cummings

Information Organizer

• Students, teachers, or professionals can use wikis to organize information for easy storage, access, and editability.

  • Information can be linked to other ideas to create a horizontal and/or hierarchical structure.
  • "This wiki is a perfect example. I use this wiki as a place to store, add to, and organize my research on wikis in writing." Toby 10:15, 1 December 2006 (EST)

• Creating an individual portfolio.

  • "For creating a porfolio they are great, and you can teach them something about managing a large network of links. . ." - Marc Pietrzykowski
  • "The wiki setup provides a space for each student; so you see all of their work, and all of your responses, in one space, a complete portfolio incrementally assembled over the course of the term." - Donald Unger

Department Collaboration

• Departments can post important social information on the wiki for easy access
• Meeting notes published for absentees and evaluation
• Contact information for department members is centralized
• Any member of department may create, edit, or delete pages.
• Curricular and Cross-Disciplinary Coordination

"As departments become increasingly creative in their efforts to accommodate more students in a distributed/blended learning environment, curricular coordination among faculty and T.A.s gets increasingly important. The wiki allows for departmental personnel, instructors, and teaching assistants to organize common course assets, such as syllabi, office hours, and assessments, without having an endless email chain or difficult to schedule face-to-face meetings." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

Conference and Colloquia Web Site/Coordination

"Many departments, schools, and scholarly centers at the university have academic conferences and colloquia. By allowing presenters and attendees access to add and edit content, the conference wiki can serve as a resource before, during, and after the event itself. The wiki can also be used by conference administrators as a means of organizing the event." -Jude Higdon (All Users Are Not Necessarily Created Equal 2005)

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