Wikis in Writing Education Research

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Writing Education Interactive Research Development Wiki

Saturday, November 07, 2009

This wiki has been established in order to facilitate research on the use of wikis in education, specifically the teaching of writing. This wiki is a direct implementation of my (Toby Coley) master's thesis research project. If you have any questions please use the questions/comments page to leave posts and I will try to check it ASAP. If you are unsure of how to post see the help page and consider wikitiquette (yes, I, Toby, coined that phrase as far as I know). Essentially, this wiki asks how can wikis contribute to composing practices, the teaching of writing, and education in general (specifically regarding pedagogy, theory, and practice) (see also purpose and goals).

Some Things to Consider About Wikis

These will change and grow as research in wiki technology increases. The lists below are not meant as a final or complete list of the advantages or disadvantages of wiki use in education (specifically the teaching of writing).

You, as a reader, editor, and author, are allowed (and encouraged) to add to or change these statements.

Advantages of Wikis

1. Wikis are great collaboration tools!
   1. Files are easily accessed on the same page (viewed by everyone involved).
   2. Users are able to access the same material at any time, from anywhere that has a network connection.
   3. Everyone is working on the same version of the page, not different documents with different authors or save dates.
   4. Information is compiled collectively.
      • "For me the advantage is being able to compile information collectively (across courses, or by students within a course. . ." - Chris Anson
      • "Now, rather than "pushing" separate copies of the document to each person, all collaborators are "pulled" in to a central place where everyone sees the same text." - Stuart Mader Mader 2006
2. Wiki is inherently democractic. All users have the same capabilities, access, and authority as any other (Leuf and Cunningham (2001) 17).
3. Wiki have the inherent ability to challenge (if not break down) natural author[ity] structures.
   1. Issues of author and individuality are transgressed to encourage community contribution and de-emphasize the self.
      • "Because a wiki is spatially and temporally disembedded the sense of authorship really can ( and in the best classes) does extend to everyone using it. It's a different, I'd argue better, kind of collaboration than the download-feedback-upload cycle." - Dayna Ottens
   2. Though some wikis have an author[ity] who controls major edits, overall community imput is considered equal in representation.
   3. [Page history] can be easily viewed, recovered, and edited.
   4. Since the authority of the teacher is challenged, the teacher is able to enact a more "guiding" role in helping students to write well.
      • ". . .one of the main benefits of teaching writing in a large scale wiki environment is that it replaces the writing teacher with a real audience and allows the teacher to truly coach the writers to create more effective prose." - Robert Cummings
4. Wikis are easily created, editable and easily learned.
   1. This ease gives wikis an upper hand over other technologies in classroom integration since wiki creating and editing can be taught in one class period.
      • "The other, maybe greater, benefit is that one can build wiki webs in seconds. When students use wiki they rarely create just one page. The build links, often to staging pages at first, Then to other information for their project and those often get linked to an index page of that student's work that becomes a homepage, and then they link to their friends, and then.... it goes on and on. That process of webbing opens up so much more when it comes to really talking about composing and getting students to think about the plurifunctional ways a text can operate in various contexts. That where the return is for me." - Dayna Ottens
      • "The syntax is purposefully simple; most people need no more than five minutes of training to do basic things like edit text, make links, and create new pages. And WYSIWYG page editors are now popping up in more and more wiki engines, avoiding the need to learn even this basic wiki syntax . . .This simplicity makes wikis great for efficient collaborative work." - Miles Kimball
   2. Wikis can become places of class collaboration, socialization, and assignment participation.
      • Learning
      • Exploration
      • Independence
      • Accountability
   3. Students can control individual projects with relative ease.
      • "Some wiki engines also allow group management, allowing you to assign students to groups that have control over their own pages." - Miles Kimball
5. In an online wiki space, student's work has the potential to reach millions of people.
   1. ". . . wikis ease students into writing for public consumption." - Joe Moxley (see Lamb 2004}
6. Wikis focus on the final draft, but notice it is a draft. The wiki space is a constantly evolving rhetorical space where students can discover their own personal voice through writing and learn to manipulate that voice to communicate persuasively. Since the wiki is constantly changing, the focus of writing in a wiki is on the process, not the product.
   1. ". . . wikis invigorate writing (“fun” and “wiki” are often associated)"
   2. ". . . wikis provide a low-cost but effective communication and collaboration tool (emphasizing text, not software)"
   3. ". . . wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts"
   4. ". . . wikis discourage “product oriented writing” while facilitating “writing as a process”" - Joe Moxley (see Lamb 2004}

1. Ideas can be linked laterally, instead of hierarchically. Content can be linked together to faciliate access.
   • "In Deleuze and Guatari's terms, wikis are rhizomes . . .Wikis . . . allow a community of people to create a dynamic structure that grows and changes with use. In my experience, this flexibility leads to greater creativity in collaboration than hierarchical technologies do." - Miles Kimball
2. Wikis create a sense of shared knowledge, which may be carried across courses, curricula, or countries.
   • "Wikis allow students to create a communal knowledge base that grows as they learn and remains valuable after the course is over." - Miles Kimball
   • Chris Anson talks about creating a wiki for one of his PhD courses with the intent that the wiki will be ""transportable" across future sections of the course . . .so that eventually it will become a resource portal with lots of cumulatively added information." - Chris Anson

Disadvantages/Limitations of Wikis

1. Could wikis embody limiting socializing and politicizing factors of our society?
2. False hopes that wikis can produce global improvement student writing when the mechanism and evaluation criteria for such is hope is unclear at best.
3. Content can be changed without student/teacher knowledge and or consent. (Simultaneously, any changes can be reverted by simply returning to a previous page version).
   • Plagiarism Concerns
   • Copyright Issues
   • Pernicious Users/Editors
4. Students may not question the background influences surrounding wiki use or question teacher motives in assigning wiki usage. (This is not to say wiki usage or teacher motives are evil or negative, only that students need to maintain a critical literacy of technology and a critical mind for evaluation of pedagogical methods).
5. Concerns surrounding author[ity] of text.
6. Students may be resistant to collaboration or loss of authority and may be reluctant to make changes on the wiki.
   • "I've found students are resistant to collaborating on content, and still a bit shy about posting comments on other people's papers, unless they could do so anonymously." - Marc Pietrzykowski
   • "In spite of the way that technology often neutralizes teacher authority, when the teacher has constructed something him/herself, students may be reluctant to "take it over" or make it something that the entire class is free to shape as they wish." - Chris Anson
7. Content can become unmanageable without someone building structure into the wiki.
   • ". . . since linking and pagemaking is so easy with a wiki, the number of links can quickly grow unmanageable unless you have some architecture in place from the beginning." - Marc Pietrzykowski

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