DD Shift

I have the song “Virus Alert” by the great Weird Al Yankovic. I have spent two days working with people who have had some nasty viruses on their computers…

Naja, where was I? This week (actually the past two weeks) we have had to work on wikis in class as a group project. I think that’s perfectly fine as a project from a student perspective. The experience is fine as a project for class.

Since my group had never worked together before, and the majority had never worked on a wiki before, we weren’t really adept at developing a smooth process for communication and posting information. It wasn’t for lack of trying. That was, in fact, one of the things that we were supposed to do first. And, we did this to a certain extent. But, since we had never been through the whole process, it was hard to guage how to work together best.

I have actually had my students work on wikis in the classroom, but it was mostly individual work with very controlled updates from peers. I think that if I would have students work in groups on a wiki, I would set up fairly firm guidelines of “how” to do the wiki– how to interact, what the things that we must discuss before we develop a wiki from scratch, “finishing”. In this way, they would have at least one example of “how to” wiki.

So, what are the steps?

1. How will you communicate?
   – What communication tools are built into the Wiki?
   – Will you use email?
2. What research needs to be done before deciding on topics?
3. What are the major topics for the project? Who will take “responsibility” for those topics?
4. When is the first draft for the topics due?
5. What should the style of the wiki be?
   – Who is your audience?
   – What sort of language? Formal? Informal?
   – How will you organize the pages – one shorter pages with more links?
6. What about images?
   – What kind?
   – Where can we get them legally?
   – Who can create them, if necessary?
7. If we edit other group-members’ writings, how will we know what is ok to edit and what we should leave alone?

I’m not being critical of the way that we did this in our class. But, I think in working with younger students it is important to help work out how to manage a new type of teamwork scenario. I might do part of this by getting them to come up with some of the rules as a class. Or, I may simply give them guidelines and then have them check in at different points to make sure that they have it all defined. My approach would depend on the maturity of the class.

I did a quick online search looking for group work tips for wikis, and I came across this page from Seattle Pacific University on “Using Wikis in Collaborative Learning Projects“. If you look at the questions on this page, they are all answered in the Powerpoint that is linked on that page. The Powerpoint seems to agree with the things that I discuss above, and gives a couple of other items as food for thought.

This entry was posted on 2008-06-28 at 13:19 and is filed under Collaboration. Tagged: Teaching-Online-Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.