I must say a few words about the keynote Friday from Saskia Sassen (the U of Chicago Sociologist) which was just completely fascinating. I was struck by her interdisciplinary experience and mastery of theory and willingness to bring it into the real world. I’m really looking forward to reading Digital Formations. I was also fortunate enough to be invited to lunch with her afterward. She asked each of the graduate students (there were about five of us) about our work and I was able to explain my thesis project – which is sometimes difficult for me – and she was very helpful and encouraging. It was quite an experience.

What I’m doing is explaining what it is and that it’s a good place to look for background info but that they need to cite the original resources to use the material in their speeches. I’d also encourage them to do this for any encyclopedic sources. I could think of scenarios where it might be acceptable to cite the Wikipedia as proof of norms.

So next week I’m going to discuss this with my classes along with more on source credibility generally.

Any suggestions? How have you handled this? (I’m particularly interested in responses from other Wikipedia contributors.)

Participatory and Anti-hierarchical

A wiki can be great for teaching or just practicing responsibility and collaboration. If you’re looking for control over discussions, documents, or other features there are other tools that facilitate this better. That is not to say that your class wiki will turn into a free for all, but that if you’re looking to lock things down this is the wrong tool. Students and teachers are equal on many wikis, in a technical sense (like all voices are technically as loud in the classroom).

Progressively building knowledge

A wiki is excellent for progressively building knowledge over time, as different authors improve on the collaboratively authored content. This could be particularly useful in advanced courses or those where there are rapid developments. Students could work on different topics over time, or improve upon existing materials. The course could evolve around a project that was useful not just to the class but through the web, if so desired. If you want to use the same course materials, problems, and exercises, a wiki might not be the best tool for you.

Collaborative work

Simply as an alternative to the clunky and proprietary “track changes,” a wiki is a much more effective cross-platform open-source solution, especially where students are authoring new material. Also, it’s much more efficient than a simple document repository or emailing documents because the “master” can (depending on the wiki functionality) be simultaneously edited by multiple authors and the master copy is always in the same place. Without our wiki we would have never been able to produce an 11 author report in under a week with virtually zero logistical problems. (see prior post.)

Other ideas? How have you used your wiki in the classroom?

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.