Blackboard’s Wiki
Blackboards’s Wiki
I have found that wikis can provide students and teachers with a number of ways to collaborate with each other on written documents. A wiki is frequently an article that has been created, edited and developed by several authors over an extended or limited period of time. One of the prime examples of using a wiki in this way are the articles collaborated on by countless authors in wikipedia.org. Authors can add information to a text but also edit incorrect information. Most recently, a friend of mine discovered in wikipedia.org an article about the streets of Philadelphia an inaccuracy pertaining to the direction of the numbered and named street. The author supplying the incorrect information wrote that the numbered streets of the city ran in an east-west direction and the named streets ran in a north-south direction. Owing to the nature of the wiki, my friend was able to open the text online, edit it and correct the error, so that the information on the directions of the named and numbered streets was factual and true.
My point with the above example is that students like my friend are able with wikis to engage with texts in a way that actively involves them with vetting, checking, and commenting on the information they read or write. Writing with a wiki can encourage a critical eye for style as well as for the careful construction and veracity of information provided.
Collaboration can take the form of many different scenarios in a wiki, i.e., individual students can collaborate with a large number of students, e.g. with the all members of a particular class or in much smaller groups involving only pairs. Last year in one wiki project from my German 101 class, each of my students collaborated with me as the instructor (and not with each other) on an extended writing assignment. Each student had their own personal wiki in which they wrote an essay about their reactions to the characters and action in a film based on a novel by Heinrich Böll entitled “Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum.” Basically, my part in the collaboration involved providing each individual student with feedback and suggestions for correcting mistakes and improving the structure and content of their essays, which I did within the wiki environment. This project extended over a period of five weeks and as a result students produced texts with content and grammatical structures that surpassed those in both quality and quantity from my classes in previous years. Research would be needed to adequately explain the reasons for the students’ performance in the wiki but it is clear that the wiki created a different kind of learning environment that was more interactive then more traditional ways of essay writing where students hand-in hard copy versions of their work that the instructor corrects and later returns with hand-written comments. In one instance, a student using the wiki had edited and revised her text 24 times over the 5 week period. I was able to see her revisions by tracing the development of her essay in the “history” which is a feature in the wiki application.
The ongoing feedback and also the fact that the students could read each other’s texts online produced for each student an audience for their writing that may easily have had a motivating effect to write texts, in which students tried harder to accurately communicate their ideas to me and to each other. Ultimately, I believe the wiki environment helped the students to be more conscious of their writing and to focus more on the task of writing as a communicative one.
In subsequent entries to this forum, I will describe other uses for wikis for teaching and learning.
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