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Building Collaborative Learning Communities

While we cannot directly link the wikis to improvement in student writing and while some students did not embrace the possibilities arising from the unstructured nature of the wiki environment, we found wikis very successful in creating collaborative writing opportunities that helped students connect with each other. We assigned collaborative writing assignments in all of our classes.

As part of a study of Pride and Prejudice in its historical context, Michelle and Polly’s class read a conduct manual from the time of the novel’s publication. Like The Rules or Emily Post, conduct manuals are prescriptive guides to manners and social norms, often aimed at women. Students tend to read conduct manuals ahistorically, reacting to them as if they were just published and as if they represented the whole of the beliefs of a time. To address these misconceptions and build class community, we charged students with writing a conduct manual. We hoped that the need to negotiate their own beliefs with those of their peers would help them think about the situated, subjective nature of prescriptive writing that might initially appear to be universal and objective. The resulting conduct manuals on How to Transition to Life After College and Good Friend Handbook can be seen on this wiki.

Initially, Polly and Michelle had intended to have students write a conduct manual focused on gender roles. However, when students in their first class heard they were going to write a conduct manual, they took charge, choosing to write a conduct manual for recent college graduates.  Assignments that allow students to choose topics that interest them, as our students did, seem particularly well suited to the student-centered potential of wikis, allowing students to drive the content as well as shape the medium. Students had fascinating discussions about who they were writing for; what they might and might not assume about their audience; how to organize their work flow; and whether they should seek consensus, report only the majority, or represent the diversity of their opinions. The bulk of these discussions happened during face-to-face class time. However, students continued to negotiate how to organize and format their manuals on the wikis. The conduct manual project prompted students to deliberately grapple with collaboration, project management, and writing. Like Carr, Morrison, Cox and Deacon (2007), we found wikis to be a great tool for collaborative writing that involves students not simply in reciting but also in “critically reflecting” upon knowledge through negotiating questions of selection, validity and organization of knowledge (p. 267). 

Peggy and Suzanne used their wiki to have students collaboratively write a research paper that explored civil liberties and personal freedoms in contemporary society. The class had finished reading, discussing and seeing a performance of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. This project gave students an opportunity to connect the play's themes to contemporary issues. Students were in groups of three and four and were each assigned a portion of the essay. Their main mode of communication was the wiki, so the instructors were able to see edits and comments. While Michelle and Polly's students grappled with most of their writing process questions when they met face to face,  Peggy and Suzanne's students did much of this work on their wikis as can be seen in the Group Research Paper.

Students initially expressed apprehension about this assignment in class, but they came to appreciate the group project. A third of them wrote in "group work" as one of the best aspects of the course on their course evaluations.  Prior to the group paper assignment, students had been sporadic in posting to the wiki, despite being assigned to do so. As students in Peggy and Suzanne's class engaged in the required collaborative project, they not only increased their wiki postings, they also changed their classroom behavior. Some groups discussed their wiki postings in class, even creating a running joke about who posted on the wiki more. Students sat with their group members with no promptings from their teachers to do so. They hung out in the halls together before class and during breaks. At times, they brought snacks to class to share with their group members. While the effect of the project on the students' writing varied with some groups showing no improvement in their drafts and others markedly improving, Peggy and Suzanne observed an increase in class camaraderie and cooperativeness as a result of this group project.

Peggy and Suzanne were especially impressed with the efforts of Group 1, who did extensive revisions online, as can be seen in the Group Research Paper.. This group, in particular, showed an increased level of camaraderie in the classroom once they began their collaborative writing project. For example, the group members sat with each other, and Peggy and Suzanne noticed them discussing the project and other assignments with each other, thus creating a supportive cohort model in both the physical classroom and on the wiki.

Others have written about wikis as platforms for collaborative learning and community building (Alexander (2002); Auguar, Raitman, and Zhou (2004); Driscoll (2007); Engstrom and Jewett (2005); Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007); Lamb and Johnson (2006, 2007); Moxley and Meehan (2007); Read (2005)). Lamb and Johnson (2007) distinguished between truly collaborative writing and cooperative writing. In Michelle and Polly’s classes, students constructed their conduct manual projects as a combination of collaborative and cooperative writing, working together for idea generation, then assigning pieces to different individuals or pairs, then coming back for final editing and revising. In Suzanne and Peggy’s class, students were more collaborative throughout the process of developing their research papers.

In working collaboratively, students saw value in learning to work as part of a team. They commented upon the need to compare their experiences, to trust each other, to find consensus, “to be persuasive and also incorporate your group members ideas into your own. We listened to each other's ideas and thought and put the best ones together.” Most students liked group writing because they felt they were able to draw upon more experiences and ideas — it was “nice to get more ideas on the table.”

Students in Peggy and Suzanne’s class noted that their collaborative research project helped them develop skills needed in the workplace: “The team research paper was very similar to working as a team at my job.” “I used my collaborative learning in class to help me on my job where there is a lot of teamwork.” One of these students enrolled in Peggy and Suzanne's next class and wrote a paper on "Collaboration and Teamwork in the Workplace" because of her experience with the group research paper assignment.

Students who did not like group writing tended to dislike having to adjust their own time management process and quality control standards to those of others. As one student noted on her course evaluation, she did not like the wiki experience because, "I like being in control. Control freak." Control freaks and perfectionists were annoyed with the slackers and procrastinators in their groups as happens in most group projects. We did not find that wikis changed this basic dynamic even though all students knew we could tell who did what work by looking at page histories.

Garza, Lodermilk and Hern (2007) have asserted that wikis decrease the counter-productive and increase the productive conflict inherent in collaborative work. This was not our experience. Borrowing from Burnett (1993) and Burnett, Hill and Duin (1997), Garza, Lodermilk and Hern (2007) identified three types of conflict inherent in collaboration: affective, procedural and substantive, where the first two are negative, but the third is positive. They argued that wikis force users to deal with affective ("you flamed me") and procedural ("how are we going to do this?") conflict right away in order to set up the wiki. According to their theory, wiki users get the messiness of affect and process out of the way so they can then focus on substantive debates about content. We did not observe such a linear process. Our students kept cycling back to deal with personality and procedural issues as they tried to develop their content, complaining about each other and debating how best to organize their work up through their final edits. The Group Research Paper gives an example of how students work on the affective and the procedural throughout their project.

Although a few students would have preferred to work on their own, the conduct manuals were successful in large part because they were collaborative. Having to collaborate on these manuals meant students immediately had to negotiate between a variety of beliefs as they found that they and their classmates did not always agree on conduct norms. Being in the position of giving rules helped students appreciate the subjective and performative nature of prescriptive writing and made them feel empowered. In so doing, the exercise did what Michelle and Polly wanted and more. They had hoped that students would appreciate that conduct manuals are not absolute pronouncements on the beliefs of a society. Student comments such as the following indicated that this exercise helped them realize this:

• "It was very interesting because it was very easy to tell someone how to do something a particular way, when I did not do it that way."
• "It also made me realize that the person writing a conduct manual is writing based on their opinions and drawing from their own experiences. This can lead to rules generated from biases and prejudices."
• "I felt like even though I was being the one giving the rules, it was a subject that is very open for opinion and that there weren’t definite rules, more like suggestions."

In addition, students gained a sense of authority and authenticity as writers:

• “It felt empowering to be stating the rules rather than following them.”
• “I think these types of exercises prepare you to enter the real world. They help you be a leader rather than someone that just follows orders.”
• “I felt I had alot of power in writing the manual. It was a different feeling telling someone how to do something then being told.”

Lamb and Johnson (2007) reported a similar effect, quoting a younger student: "It is so cool to put something ON the Internet, rather than always taking stuff OFF." These quotes demonstrate the power students find in writing with the goal of influencing an audience other than the teacher.

Having worked on the conduct manual, students demonstrated that they came to understand the conduct manual assigned for the class, written by Dr. Gregory, more critically as the pronouncements of an individual in a particular time and place:

• "I will read conduct manuals with more of an open mind. If someone were to read our conduct manual twenty years from now they would probably laugh at how we think young adults should act and how they should conduct their affairs. Over time everything changes and people evolve, I think Dr. Gregory was only telling his daughters what he knew to be true at that time."
• "When I read Dr. Gregory the first time, I took the information too literally. After writing a conduct manual I believe that I better understand his point of view."
• "I can better understand that these are guidelines, not to be taken word for word."
• "I would see it more as a suggestion, and not necessarily for his daughter, but for the people of his time. Conduct manuals, I now see, are very opinionated and even as a group it was difficult to keep opinions to a minimum."

Students in all of the classes valued the opportunities to learn from each other. On a five point scale where four means "usually" and five means "always," students reported on class evaluations that the instructors provided opportunities for them to learn from each other an average of 4.6 (Polly and Michelle's first wiki class), 4.73 (Suzanne and Peggy's first wiki class), 4.75 (Polly and Michelle's second wiki class). The work with their peers resulted in students increasing the amount that they identified with their classmates by “feeling like they are like you in some important ways” by twenty percent from the start to the end of the Fall quarter. 

As a result, students who had begun the quarter suspicious of and even hostile to their classmates from a different school, ended the quarter stressing their appreciation for the diversity of the classes and their new-found respect for difference:

• "Having a diverse class was great. I liked how everyone could bring something different to the table because of their background and their personalities. I enjoyed the group discussions because everyone interprets the passages from the book differently and it made me think more openly. I am happy I took this course and look forward to other classes. I think this was a terrific class for me, it was a challenge and I knew if I made it through the entire quarter that I would continue with school."
• "Our class was made up of a very diverse group. I feel fortunate to have met all of my classmates and hope to see them in the future. They have taught me how to see things in a differently. I have learned from them that everyone struggles at one point or another. Everyone in the class had a different view and feelings. I wish that I had the cultural background that P__ has, or the humor that R__ has. It was really a great experience to be able to hear about each student’s creative process. It is interesting that all of us have different ways of overcoming a difficult situation. I really enjoyed a lot of the presentations because they not only pertained to the creative process of the class and writing, but too many other life experiences as well. Each and every student brought a different perspective to the class."
• "One of the highlights of Men of Fortune/Women of Cents, was the diversity of the students in the class. We had a girl that was right out of high school, and a women with a Twenty-five year old child, students from Depaul, and students from Wright, students in there first class, and students in there last, and even three men varying in age. It was almost the perfect mixture of personalities, and life experiences. I really enjoyed hearing others thoughts, and I feel that I learned a lot through our open class discussions. Through the reflections and opinions of others in the class, I got a great sense of how unique each intellect was. This was even true with the two professors through their teaching styles and personalities. I truly feel that there are many different types of intelligence, and this class brought many of them together. I walked away from this class with a great respect for each of my classmate’s stories."
• "One of the most important things I will take away from this class, is the bond I have developed with my fellow classmates--whether they are from Wright or from DePaul. This bridge program made me realize that we are all in this for the same thing--to further ourselves through education, and we all bring our unique contributions to the shared learning process."
• "I really enjoyed the range of age and intellect from my classmates. . . . I now try a little harder to be more open to people’s personal decisions."
• "The variety of various views of different people; ages, gender, ethnicity and profession made this course interesting. . . . Having students from another college was interesting also because it brought a different learning experience."

Adult students tend to return to school feeling like they are alone in their difference. In coming to recognize and appreciate the diversity in their classes, these students found a place for themselves in the college classroom. The wikis offered a shared space for students to find a place for themselves and to recognize what their peers brought to the class. The wikis did this by replacing the two schools' incompatible course management systems with something that students from both schools had to learn together, by providing a venue in which older students' life experiences were complimented by younger students' technical expertise, and by giving students an opportunity to collaborate and share the results of their collaboration.