David Duchovny
I am hearing the song “David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp. It’s quite appropriate, actually, since the new X-Files film is opening soon. It’s really quite by accident I’m listening to the song, though. My husband left and took his computer (our normal source of music). I had to dig out my little guy (my old iBook and alternative, emergency source of music).
I have thought a little bit more about wikis from a teacher perspective. I did have my students put together a wiki earlier this school year. They were SO INTO IT with a few notable exceptions which I address in another post. But, when it came down to evaluating the blogs– even though I had a set of clear criteria by which to judge the quality of their work, it was difficult marking their work.
Why?
- Instead of working directly in the wiki environment, students felt more comfortable typing up their work in a Word Processor and then copying and pasting. You couldn’t really use the history to see how much they contributed, so the dream of being able to see how much effort they put in was dashed…This is not too, too much of a problem. After all, for other types of group-based assignments, you do not have visibility of all of the group effort that went into the project. You can use the tried-and-true evaluate your and your group-members’ effort to get a feel for who really contributed.
- Students, despite the fact that we covered copyright explicitly and were actually very conscientious about the media they used, still inadvertently used copyrighted materials in their work without citation. As a compensation, I sat down with each one to talk about the problems to help clarify the issues. For some, they didn’t even worry about the issues. For others, they had very good arguments as to why they thought the media they used was within their rights.One thing that I did was require them to cite their sources in MLA style (school standard). I have to rethink this. Citations in this format online seem unnatural. Perhaps in the school we could agree upon some citation strategy that ties more closely to hyperlinking (a more natural attribution method online).
- Going through the pages (all 90 at the end of the project) took an insane amount of time. And, I felt that I did not give each of their pages justice. It was clear both from the history and the care with which they set up their pages that I should have spent more time there evaluating.This one is a struggle for me. I will have to think carefully about how to structure future projects like this so that it is:
– more tightly organized so that it is easier to find student’s work, and
– either control the way the pages are laid out or the number of pages that they are allowed to create.
It’s tough for me to limit this way. I don’t think that it is natural for online wiki development– although I could most likely tie it to good user interface design. I will have to think about this more.
