Wikis, Wikis, Everywhere--Part I

This semester I'm using wikis (MediaWiki to be precise) in two of my classes, though in different ways. I'm doing so at Jerry's suggestion, despite my greatest previous interaction with wikis being arguing with students about why they can't use Wikipedia as the scholarly source for their research papers. In two separate posts, I'll describe the two classes, the plans for the wiki use in each class, and the progress so far.

In my senior readings seminar, I used to have students email me comments and questions about the reading for a particular day a couple of hours before class starts. I would then take those comments and questions and shape the class discussion for the day based on the particular areas of need or interest expressed by the students. This semester, the students post their comments and questions to a wiki page. [I set up one page for each day's discussion for the semester.] Of course, a large change under this new system is that they now see each others' postings. [I've resisted this before, fearing repetitiveness, copying, and an unfair burden on those who posted first to carry the class.] I've found that so far, I was completely wrong. The quality of the questions and comments have gone up from previous semesters. What's more, they've begun to respond to each others' questions, answering the factual queries and starting to engage the open-ended ones. In other words, the discussion begins before class does.

Of course, I could have just used a forum on Blackboard or some other open-source software (and I've used such forums with varying degrees of success in other classes with other assignments). They'd still be able to see what the other students had written and respond to those comments. The advantage of the wiki is that students can more easily edit and/or comment on each others' work than in a forum, which is either hierarchical or linear (or both). Using the past version function of the wiki I can actually trace the evolution of the conversation as students add material to the ongoing discussion, sometimes inserting themselves in between other people's comments, sometimes using bold to emphasize particular points that others have made. They haven't taken to truly editing each others' work, a common issue from what I've heard from those who have used wikis in teaching. [There was a comment deleted by someone else, but that was an accident, for which there was much apologizing. :-) ] And I don't see this lack of editing each others' work as a problem since I haven't explicitly asked them to do that.

I hope the quality of posting and interaction remains at the level that it's at for the rest of the semester. If so, I'll see it as a great success.

Next time, I'll discuss the wiki as used in an upper-level lecture & discussion class.