wikis

Earlier this spring, I blogged about the class wiki project my students are I undertookd in the Digital Rhetoric class this semester. Well, the class is nearing its completion, and a large part of the project are on wikibooks.org. It is called, simply, Digital Rhetoric.

By and large, the creation of this first version on the book went smoothly, with only a few minor obstacles. Of course, this is the first step and, if I teach the course again, I plan to ask the new group of students to revise and add to these existing chapters. By the way, the way I see it, the problem of project sustainability and keeping up-to-date is one of the most challenging aspects of writing and publishing open access wikibooks.

I have been using wikis in my teaching for several years now. I have tried them in classes ranging from first year composition, in which I asked students to create brief glossaries of terms from difficult readings to upper level courses in visual rhetoric where students produced longer wiki texts which were later published on Wikibooks.org.

As my students and I work on this project, I am hoping to gain some insights on strategies for successful management of group writing projects as well as, of course, producing good research and writing.

This blog post will offer a series of updates on the project.

1. We are about two weeks into the project. I decided to let students shape the contents of the final document to a large extend; they were asked to suggest the main elements of the final work given its rhetorical purpose, audience, and occasion. They vetoes 2 out of 3 elements that I had suggested and replaced them with their own, which, I must say, work better than what I had suggested given the scope and purpose of the overall project.
2. Students are working in writing teams of 2 or 3 on a literature review of an essay project. We are close to completing a "professional" draft which will be shared and commented on in small groups. here are my observations so far: project management by students has not been an issue. I gently suggest various ways of doing things, and they are not shy about shooting some of my suggestions down and proposing their own ways, which work better or at least as well. More to come...
3. The collaborative essay part of the wiki project is humming alone nicely. Yesterday in class, the students worked on developing arguments based on literature reviews they had read earlier. With the exception of one or two groups, everyone else seems to have no trouble with making sure everyone contributes equally.
4. Another update: writing teams are finishing up their essays and individual students are about to begin their "example" projects. Only one of the teams so far has a member that has been "mia", the rest are working well. Then, we will pull everything together, check it, write an introduction, and put it all on Wikibooks. That is the plan. We still have about 3 weeks and more updates are coming later.
5. We have finished the collaborative essay part of the project which the students wrote in the wiki. And, they managed the project, more or less, by themselves, coming up with sound ideas both for the writing itself, and for how to manage the steps of the project. We have now moved to the individual stage of the project, where the challenges will be different.

I hasten to add that it has not all been games and fun. I will dedicate the next update to the challenges that we encountered.

1. Here is the first and quite unexpected hurdle. After completing the collaboratie wiki essay part of the project, a few students appear to be unwilling to share their individual projects online with others. I think that this is a deeper phisolophical question of some students not wanting others to "judge" their work, one we cannot solve in a week or two. What is surprizing, though, is that we are talking not about freshmen, but about advanced level students.
   

On April 24, I delivered a presentation about wikis to the JMU library faculty and staff. pdf of the slides is attached.