Teaching with a Wiki
The Composition Wiki has been online for two years and has been used by writing and literature classes for peer review, collaborative writing, planning group projects, and compiling and amending class notes. One class co-wrote a textbook together using the Wiki. Another class used the Wiki in research projects—to develop research questions, share hyperlinks, and post bibliographies. Many classes use the Wiki to share drafts of their writing, facilitate peer response, and generate ongoing conversations about their work as it develops over the semester. The unique features of a Wiki allow you to work collaboratively to write, rewrite, and view previous versions of web content. What use will you find for the Composition Wiki?
To use the Miami University Composition Wiki, you will need to use your userid and password to read or to contribute.
About Wikis
A Wiki or wiki (pronounced [wîki:], [wi:ki:] or [vi:ki] is a website that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. "Wiki" also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website.
The Portland Pattern Repository created the first-ever wiki, to share html code. The name was based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning "quick" or "super-fast".
In the writing classroom, WIKIs can be used for collaborative in-class writing. The WIKI can be used to allow students to edit their own papers, and the work of other students, online. Students should also be encouraged to do analyses of online WIKIS—allowing them to investigate dynamic collaborative compositions, investigate issues of intellectual property and dissect culturally-constructed and re-negotiated meanings.
Pushing students to reflect on their own use of the WIKI allows for further pedagogical possibilities. We start to see what a WIKI can do, but also what Composition must always do.
- Commenting on the convergences and dissonances of collaborative work
- Interrogating interfaces and the movement between them
- Creating transformative recursivities
- Calling attention to the ways information morphs as it circulates among bodies, subjectivities and ‘machines’
- Instantiating within the body new patterns of movement/thought which might more closely resemble the fluid and fragmented processes of composition
- Laying out the many prostheses of composition by interrogating the history of an ‘edited’ document, disturbing fraught boundaries within and between bodies, ideas and products.
Some Suggestions for a Wiki Class
(These suggestions are available and amendable on the Miami CompositionWIKI — the homebase for all Miami WIKI activity, accessible with you uniqueID and password)
To get student writing up on the WIKI, you have several options. If you have limited time in the computer classroom, I suggest you get students to email you their writing the night before, and that you paste it up onto the WIKI yourself. In your class’ main page, click on EDIT and in the form, write down all of your students’ names. Make each of these names an INTERNAL LINK by highlighting the text and clicking on the INTERNAL LINK button on the toolbar. Save your changes.
When you click on a student name, you will go to a new page, where you can paste in that students’ writing. When you get more tricky, you/the student can create a main page for each class member, which can act as an editable e-portfolio. But for now, clicking on a student name in the main class page takes you to that students’ writing for that days’ class.
Later on, students could be responsible for putting their own writing into their own page, or they could even compose in the WIKI itself.
The WIKI allows for a gradual introduction to html composition, and can support multimedia links and embedding, if you want to get fancy. The WIKI can also be used outside of the classroom altogether, or classroom activities can bridge to online activity later.
When students come to class, I suggest you find ways to get them moving around the room AND through one anothers’ writing. Design innovative ways to encourage collaboration: not just one student at her own computer scrolling though her classmates’ writing.
Students should click on their peers’ names to get to writing, then click on EDIT to go into, write within, read, comment and question their peers’ work.
There is no reason that this has to happen in static one person-to-one computer-to-one peer interfaces. Why not get a few people reading and working in a piece of writing at a time?
You may want to suggest that students write all comments and questions and changes in CAPS, so that they are easy to immediately trace. Students can ‘sign’ their comments by putting their name in after them.
After initial work-shopping activities, why not ask students to go back into their page and look at the HISTORY of their work? This allows students to compare versions of their essays against one another. This is an interesting way to disrupt the process/product binary.
Possibilities for Further Research
There is an example questionnaire posted at the Miami CompositionWIKI for you to transform, edit and expand, designed to get students to think about the ways the WIKI effected their composition, their process, and the ways the WIKI reveals things about composition, period.
- such as the multiple prostheses of the ‘process,’ in the form of changes, hanging comments, questions, old versions, etc.
- like the politics of the interface(s) they work with—computers, software, peers; and other spaces, technologies and bodies.
Some Final Thoughts
Keep experimenting with the WIKI at all stages of the process. The model presented here is limited, because it is just based on work-shopping and gathering feedback. But there are no aspects of the Composition classroom that can’t be transformed in the WIKI, including class discussion…even the class syllabus or your teaching philosophy might be collaboratively amended online as the semester goes on.
Wiki Links
- Wikipedia.org
Why not have students perform more dynamic rhetorical analyses by tracing the history of definitions on the wikipedia? - Penn State WIKI Digital Proposal
A WIKI document outlining Penn State’s plans for using the WIKI in writing classes. - Matt Barton’s TIKIWIKI
A great outline of some of the possible uses and of the importance of this technology to Composition scholars, teachers and students. Written by one of the editors of Kairos. - Computers and Composition Online
Articles of interest, including several articles on the use of WIKIs. - Kairos
Articles of interest, including several articles on the use of WIKIs. - The Intellectual Property Caucus of the CCCC