I have some experience with Wikis, but not tons. Fortunately, my first experience with them was GREAT, so I'm open to working with their quirks and making things come together. My first experience was a collaborative final project with a grad class in the summer of 2008. We all were responsible for creating information, application, and resources for 4 different content literacy strategies. I still visit that site from time to time, but the experience of creating such a useful 'document' was great!
For my students, I like the idea of collaborative writing when we are doing pre-work and specific writing assignments for a text. My students often need a high degree of background knowledge to make reading successful, and to that end, allowing them to create resources for each other as well as asking them to become authors is a great exercise. For example, when we read Of Mice and Men or Holes, we would be able to create pages dedicated to each of the characters, the various locations, and I would likely work with them on bubbl.us to create a character map and embed that into our page.
Another area of writing that would lend itself is persuasive writing. If students are able to create a 'pro' or 'con' note on a wiki page and then find resources that support that point of view, they would have the makings of a very rich debate when the event moved from the Wiki to actual classroom performance/activity.
An area of concern I would have would be reliability (preteaching is a must to reduce these issues), as well as students feeling reluctant about working with hypertexts (as mentioned in Beach et al). For students who have to work hard to read a 'static' text, I think many would be less than thrilled with the idea of clicking through a text and making higher level decisions about where they go and how they read through the text. I do think there is great potential in 'freeing' them from the static way of reading, but it will take some convincing. Hypertexts will feel like extra work to them when actually they are reading 'aides' to any concept they might not quite understand.
I like collaborative writing overall if it has purpose (any writing assignment MUST have purpose) and if the students are guided through the process. It is a mistake to take 'group work' and put it online and call it collaborative writing. There needs to be a higher level of planning and use of the flexibility of the program/tool.
Many positive uses--hopefully I get back into a classroom before all of this changes too much and I have to start learning all over again! :)
Final Project
16 years ago
Posts
You have so great ideas to use wikis in your classroom. I love the link to each character in a novel. I am wanting to set my wiki up to use for my final project, but I am having trouble narrowing my focus. There are so many directions to go in.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I was in Anne's class with you this summer also. How is the distance learning going for this course. I am also curious how your pop culture class is going. I saw you have a blog for it. I was considering taking it this Spring. Are you enjoying it?
I absolutely agree with your opinion about mistaking digital "group work" for "collaborative writing." I've thought and thought about redoing the research papers I teach, and as much as I've always liked the idea of students working together (less for me to grade!), but chicken out because I'm too afraid one person will do all the work. The great thing about wikis is the teacher can see who's logging in to edit!
ReplyDeleteLisa, I was in Anne's writing class this summer. I thought of you last weekend when I was at Culver's and a couple was signing to each other. I don't know too many people who would be able to follow their conversation, but I knew you could!