Wikis in High School
Last month,
Vinson
wrote about
the use of wikis in school projects, and it reminded me to dust off some
notes I took from a conversation with my daughter Sean MacLennan, late
last year. It was a history project about World War II, and the class
was asked to compose their reports on a wiki. Sean is a pretty good
writer, and she
likes to write
, so I was interested in her thoughts on the wiki as a medium, and the
collaborative process ...
Since there were so many
parts of WWII, the wiki format helped, because you could break it down
into categories - chunk up the tasks into parts. Plus, we could create
the categories we wanted, under the outline [stubbed out by] the
teacher.
There were 24 kids in the class, but this was a project across
multiple history classes [4], so we're talking about 100 authors. All
were split into groups of 3-4, each had to do part of the shared paper.
Each group had their own subset of the assignment, and built their own
mini-wiki - a home page plus 10 pages of "categories" or topics.
We literally started with a blank sheet. The assignment handout
had the high-level outline, but we had to key it into the wiki / web
site to get things started.
So, much of the lesson was about the mechanics of the new medium.
Q: How did you carve up the assignment?
We used the sidebar to
create the sub pages and a table of contents. Everybody got in a
workgroup, discussed how to divvy up the categories, and then started to
work on their own pages - add the page, then fill it out. We got to give
feedback, too - we had to critique each other's work, but it was more
like "ooo, stop, you are adding too much text". I noticed some
competition / peer pressure starting, to add as much as the other
people.
We could add pictures, links to other web pages, and references
to Wikipedia with a hot link to it.
One challenge I noticed: some were copying and pasting from the
web, and adding no value or reading what they were copying (ex "... if
you look at the picture below ..."). Some were not putting a lot of
effort into it, and the others thought this might bring the group's
grade down; we were definitely nervous about it.
"Peer review" extended to looking at other pages in your own
group and grading them.
So, participative collaboration is part of the lesson as well - the
group dynamic, and the idea that
not everyone wants to be an author
. She also hit the issue where one person needed additional training,
and hands-on assistance with some of the mechanics (ex. how do I make a
table?) - yet another form of collaboration, and plus awareness of the
need for web 2.0 tools to be
easy to use
(transparent vs opaque?)
What about grading?
There was no coordination
on look/feel of the overall structure - once the groups had their
subset, they just did their own thing. However, the grade for the group
was partially based on whether or not all the information came across.
No bonus for the group grade on style points; one person's page could
include images, maps, even videos, and another page could just be text
cribbed from elsewhere. The individuals got points on their content, but
the only part of the group grade was simply whether or not the list of
categories was covered. There was some part of your grade for content,
however - had to include at least one image, table, graphic, etc., and
those had to be spread out reasonably well. There was a target list of
10 content add-on elements, and they had to be spread evenly across the
group.
So it was a technical learning event - how to build a page and add
content (text and other) - but not a qualitative thing (how good was the
writing?).
Any last comments?
No, just get this done and
go set up the Wii to the internet, so I can Mario Kart with my friends!
Clearly, there is more than one way to collaborate!