Using a wiki in grad school

I started graduate school in the communication department at the University of Illinois at Chicago last Fall. The program begins with an introductory seminar course in media studies, which is one of those “we’re going to cover the past X hundred years of X subject so you better get used to reading more than humanly possible” type of classes. On the first day our teacher said that we, as a class, should think about strategies to distribute the reading burden, although we each were responsible for all of the material. I suggested that we use a wiki.

Our professor created an environment where collaboration was encouraged and this is not the norm in our discipline and many others. Often, grad students see their peers as the competition that they must overcome for grades and jobs. A wiki wouldn’t work in such an environment. Fortunately we were all first year students in a very collegial department. Another student, who had worked as a web designer, offered to host the wiki on his personal server space.

Everyone read the assignments, and we also assigned at least two people to post their notes on a particular article or book. The first person to post would just paste in their notes and the second would add additional insights or comments, and everyone was welcome to add. We ended up with notes for virtually all of the readings, plus study guides for the exams. These will be available to next year’s class for them to improve upon.

The key to the high volume of use was our “assignment” of classmates to post notes. A little peer pressure goes a long way, even in grad school. In other classes without “assignments” the volume of use has been low but interest in the technology and concept has remained high.

During the spring semester I was involved in another graduate class, this time as a program coordinator (my role was similar to teaching assistant). The class, Qualitative Research Methods, received grant funding to work with a community newspaper, North Lawndale Community News, to research the impact of the paper on the community and find ways that the paper itself could more readily document community impact.

The students worked in teams but submitted individual reports. In the end we needed to submit a single report to the paper. As part of the exam the students collectively edited eleven individual reports (about 80-90 pages) into one report (about 40 pages) using the wiki. This happened within one week, and largely, in the last three days of that week. The professor and I assigned certain students as “captains” of predetermined sections (i.e. introduction, literature review etc.) and others were general editors, making sure the document flowed as a whole. We ended up with a single coherent document with eleven authors.

Dave Elfving, the fellow student who hosts our wiki, put together this video presentation about our project for the Social Software in the Academy conference. Due to our demonstrated successes and wonderful openness of our department we are now in the process of moving it to a department server. This will allow for its survival well beyond our tenure as students (provided we can recruit gardeners in the upcoming cohort). Once the move to university servers is complete much of our wiki will be publicly viewable & I’ll make an announcement when that happens. We hope to continue sharing our experiences using a wiki and other social software in grad school.