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Wiki Research
Student Work Our Responses |
Improving Academic Writing SkillsThe Praise for Wikis
As online collaborative writing platforms, wikis garner the most praise in education circles as tools for collaboration. Almost every source in our Annotated Bibliography mentions this attribute of wikis, and we discuss it in more detail in Building Collaborative Learning Communities. Besides enabling collaborative writing and building community, we hoped that by using wikis, our students would improve as writers. Our hopes arose from scholarship celebrating wikis for their potential to help students understand writing as a process, develop metacognitive awareness, take charge of their writing and learning, and practice academic discourse.
For example, Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007) and Lamb (2004) asserted that wikis focus students on the process of writing. These authors argue that wikis make the messiness of writing explicit for students and, because wikis are so unstructured and flexible, they also put students more in charge of their writing than they would be in more structured writing situations. The focus on process is particularly important for our students because process is often a new concept for students coming from low-performing public schools, as many of our City College students do, and for older students, such as many of our SNL students, who last attended school before the dominance of process as a pedagogical practice.
Carr, Morrison, Cox and Deacon (2007) conducted a study that both supports the assertions of Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007) and Lamb (2004) and introduces the potential for student and faculty resistance to wikis. The study followed 174 students using a wiki for a month-long module in a junior-level political science class. Having written their own papers, students were to post them to the wiki for group feedback and for the purpose of producing a collaboratively written introduction and conclusion to their essays. Carr, Morrison, Cox and Deacon (2007) concluded that the wiki helped students learn how to work in collaborative groups, encouraged process writing, and promoted critical thinking by involving students in negotiating questions of selection, validity and organization of knowledge. The authors attributed some student resistance and lack of engagement with the wiki to students being too focused on the short-term (turning in the assignment rather than learning a new way of learning), anxiety about exposure, last-minute work habits, the uncomfortableness that comes with change, and resistance to group work. Students who did better had teachers who supported using a wiki, encouraged students to use it and coached them on group dynamics and group management.
Working with a student population similar to ours, Robin Farabaugh (2007) used wikis for low-stakes assignments designed to help students use writing as a tool for thinking. She demonstrates how wikis build community through collaborative meaning-making while giving students a chance to learn academic discourse. Farabaugh used wikis for four semesters to teach students associative thinking, brainstorming and analysis. She assigned students to analyze the recurring themes, images, language and symbols in Shakespeare's sonnets. Then, students hyperlinked to each other's analyses of specific sonnets to trace associative webs. Her assignment was intentionally scaffolded for writing to learn, with students moving from directed analysis to comparison of each other's ideas to writing their own papers. Farabaugh (2007) also used the wiki to put students in charge of their learning by having them generate questions for mid-term and final exams.
Much of the literature on using wikis to develop writing abilities does not present research studies, but describes compelling classroom uses of wikis. Read (2005) reports on professors at Bowdoin College and Bemidji State University who have used wikis to promote close reading, community building and continual revision in English literature and freshman composition classes. At Bowdoin College, Mark Phillipson used a wiki to have students annotate poems on his class wiki and then comment on each other's annotations. Phillipson believes that writing for a wiki has prompted students to be more concise as they write to be read on a computer screen. M.C. Morgan, at Bemidji State University, also believes that using wikis has changed how his students write. Morgan finds that using wikis in his writing classes encourages students to engage in a process of continuous revision. Driscoll (2007), Lamb and Johnson (2007) and Lamb (2004) all point out that writing for publication gives students the incentive of a “real world” audience--an incentive that can fuel the continuous revising Morgan described. Examples of assignments in which students write for publication on Wikipedia can be found in Kiernan (2008). Driscoll (2007) and Lamb and Johnson (2007) showed how wikis can be used for group-based writing projects other than papers such as collaborative note taking, brainstorming, outlining, and developing bibliographies or study guides. These projects can be the product of collaboration between students within one class, in paired classes, in a course, department, school or between schools. Students can also use wikis to build portfolios of their work in a class or over the course of their studies.
What We Found
In our classes, students reported significant improvement in their writing abilities and confidence after taking these classes. All respondents on end-of-quarter surveys agreed (39%) or strongly agreed (61%) with the statement “your writing skills improved as a result of your taking the class.” In the two classes we taught in the fall, students expressed eleven percent more confidence in their writing skills at the end of the quarter than at the start.
When asked directly if their work on the wikis had helped them improve their writing skills, sixty-seven percent of respondents agreed (50%) or strongly agreed (17%). However, we have no evidence that the wikis themselves contributed to this improvement or that anything unique to the wiki environment enhanced our students’ writing skills. When not prompted to consider the effect of the wikis, students, on course evaluations, identified only the amount of writing and revising they did and the feedback from two teachers as the reasons for their writing improvement.
Although our use of wikis may not have caused writing improvement, we found wikis to be flexible tools for assignments that encourage student writing, promote metacognitive thinking about this writing, and allow students to practice collaborative writing, textual analysis and peer feedback. Perfectly good non-wiki methods exist to do each of these things, but wikis provide an online tool that is easy to use and that helps develop a sense of community.
In fact, we found that the wikis lent themselves to assignments that encouraged students to engage in metacognitive thinking about their writing and writing process. The annotated Group Research Paper includes examples of students explaining their writing decisions in the course of developing a paper together. In the second iteration of Michelle and Polly's class, all students posted their drafts and self-evaluations of their drafts on their wiki page. Michelle and Polly then posted their comments on the drafts directly to the wiki page. As a result, students had a running record of their drafts, ideas about their papers and the feedback they had received from their teachers all in one place. At the end of the quarter, the students drew from this record to write (and post on the wiki) reflective essays about their learning in the class. Students could also look at the drafts, self-evaluations and teacher feedback on their peers’ pages. This transparency opened for students a perspective usually reserved for teachers, allowing students to see how one assignment can generate very different papers, discover common themes in teacher comments, and observe how others think about their own writing and respond to teacher feedback.
Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007) assert that wikis open up the artificiality of static drafts by fostering and making visible the "dynamic" and "messy" nature of writing. When working on their group writing projects, our students engaged in an ongoing process of collaboration and revision. Though they tended to work in deadline-driven bursts of activity, this activity was far from a linear process with discrete steps. For example, although the manager of the Group Research Paper does her best to march her group through the process they agreed upon for developing the paper, she has to revise that process several times. By providing a record of this messiness, the wiki helps students who expect writing to be linear and much neater see that the mess is productive. Adult students want to get things "right," so they can be reluctant to trust the mess. Some of this resistance to messiness is apparent when the students writing the Group Research Paper are supposed to be brainstorming a paper topic. The first couple of students offer only one brief idea. Then, a third student posts six ideas with his commentary on the relative strength of each. In so doing, he models the productive messiness of brainstorming. The next student to post then writes an entire paragraph presenting his ideas.
While the group writing projects did make some of the messiness of writing evident, students usually did not edit their papers on the wikis. Instead, students in all of our classes tended to revise in Word, then paste the revised drafts under the previous draft or on new wiki pages. Because our students are familiar with discussion boards with successive postings, they may have been using this model for their postings to the wikis. In introducing the wikis, we should have put more stress on how they are different from discussion boards and shown students why they might want to take advantage of this difference. In particular, students rarely used the wikis to revise and edit each other's writing. As in other peer revising situations, students avoided peer revising because they did not know how to improve the writing, did not feel they had the authority to change the writing, or did not want to upset their peers. When they did make changes to each other's writing, doing so in separate postings rather than "writing over" their peers' work seemed to be a way to offer their suggestions without violating the original text. We might have encouraged more revising on the wiki if we had addressed these concerns directly and modeled collaborative wiki-based revision. Because we saw the wiki as something new and different from what we had done before, Michelle and Polly did not think about their wiki assignments as peer revision and so neglected to prepare students for them. The newness of the technology blinded us to the obvious. Finally, there was a very practical reason why both we and our students were writing and revising in Word rather than on the wiki. The earlier version of PBwiki we were using in these classes did not have a way to save edits automatically if our internet connection broke, which it often did in our school computer labs and at many of our homes. The new version of PBwiki has solved this problem so that, although my internet connection just went down, the many revisions I have just made to this paragraph were not lost.
Still, the collaborative writing assignments did make visible how students developed their papers, if not how they revised them. However, for the individual writing assignments, all but one student posted discrete, static drafts to the wiki, adding new drafts only as assigned to do so. The exception, a student who revised his paper on the wiki, almost got no credit for his revisions because we were so used to seeing new drafts posted under old ones. As a result, much of the messy, dynamic nature of writing to which Garza, Loudermilk and Hern (2007) refer remained obscured. To move from the static, deadline-driven individual writing we received, we would need not only to provide students with more coaching, but also to replace pre-set draft checkpoints with assessment methods that reward the continuous revision process we saw in the group writing projects.
As Driscoll (2007), Lamb and Johnson (2007) and Lamb (2004) have argued, we found that the prospect of publication motivated some students to engage in ongoing, student-initiated revising. Similarly, Read (2005) reported that students at Bowdoin College engaged in continuous revision while writing for a public wiki on Romantic authors (see http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:8668/space/snipsnap-index). Michelle and Polly used Wikipedia to provide students with such an opportunity, requiring students to post to the Pride and Prejudice Wikipedia site, which brings almost immediate assessment from a zealous community of Austen enthusiasts. As part of this assignment, students read the Pride and Prejudice “talk page,” giving them an example of intellectual debate outside the academy as well as introducing them to the assessment standards for this publication. Students also learned about the standards for supporting their claims in Wikipedia. Learning about these standards provided us with a springboard for discussing the reasons for academic standards of evidence. Students defended their edits of the pages in class and then posted them on the site. While a few students waited until the last minute to do their work for this assignment, others, some of whom had previously not been particularly active students, were engaged by this assignment and continued to report back on what had happened to their postings over time.
Similarly, Suzanne and Peggy had students work collaboratively to develop research papers. The Group Research Paper is an annotated collection of the three wiki pages developed by one student team working on this project. Because students had to explain, justify and debate their ideas, students once again were engaged in metacognitive thinking about how to pick a focus, construct their thesis statements, and organize their papers, while also taking part in some collective word-smithing. Students not accustomed to revising could see how doing so can make significant improvements to their drafts. For example, here are three points in the development of the sample group's thesis statement and eventual introduction:
While this example shows the group becoming more focused and detailed with revision, collaboration did not always result in improved writing. In fact, a proposed revision that would have significantly improved this group's paper was not adopted, probably because it came too late in the process. Another group ignored attempts by a couple of members to focus their thesis more narrowly because of their desire for consensus and the leader's failure to acknowledge suggestions for revision.
Both groups were inclined to sacrifice focus to achieve consensus by including everyone's ideas. The first group, however, did a better job of progressively refining their initially broad thesis. The second group started with the manager offering a thesis statement that would "cover everything we were talking about in class. This covers all of the points we were talking about." Not surprisingly, his proposed thesis was big and baggy: If people act on irrational fears, it can lead to the loss of personal liberties. The people of Salem acted on irrational fears and experienced the loss of personal liberties. We will compare that to the events following the beginning of the "war on terror", and the personal liberties that we lost as a result of our fears.
Two members of the group attempted to focus this thesis statement, but they did not themselves revise or edit it. One suggested the group specify the fears and lost liberties of those in Salem, but he did not list specific fears or liberties. Another member suggested some specific post-9/11 government actions that decreased personal liberty, but he did not revise the thesis to include these. In both cases, the group manager was either unable or unwilling to revise the thesis based upon these suggestions, instead posting slightly better versions of the initial, overly general thesis. Had the group members been using the wiki to revise rather than just discuss the thesis, the results might have been different.
The desire for consensus and the inclination to achieve it by including everything, the timing of suggestions for revision, and the willingness of the group leaders to entertain other ideas all influenced the extent to which this collaborative writing project produced improved drafts. Yet, even when the products of these collaborative assignments were not great, we saw students learning a good deal about writing, collaboration and each other in the process. We talk about the last two points in Building Collaborative Learning Communities. In the examples above, you can see both groups grappling with what it means to narrow a thesis and how to connect ideas. For some students, the value of this assignment is in learning to ask these questions of themselves.
While the collaborative projects were successful, we had much less success when we used the wikis like we might use a discussion board to post teacher-written questions about the readings. Students saw these assignments as “make work” and only posted minimally if they were not receiving points for their work. The mere fact that these questions were on a wiki did not suddenly move students to engage with them for the pure joy of learning. The exception was on a wiki Polly did for a class entitled “Christians, Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spain.” In this class, students each created their own pages on which they were asked to post reflections on readings, movies, exhibits and websites. Many students posted comments on each other’s pages, apparently motivated by their desire to share their experiences and ideas about faith and faith culture with each other:
Three Students Commenting on Another Student’s Postings
Unlike our teacher-written discussion questions, the students in this class had the more open-ended assignment to post their reflections and they ran with it.
Thus, while we found much to like about wikis, we also saw many opportunities to better use wikis by being more deliberate in exploiting their potential and in making this potential explicit to our students. Heather James (2004) and Brian Lamb (2004) both noted that new technologies, like wikis, are tools that are only as good as the uses to which one puts them. In "My Brillant Failure: Wikis in Classrooms," James (2004) told how she embraced teaching with a wiki because of its collaborative, social constructivist promise, but found that she used it just as "pumped-up Power Point" because her teaching practices were still teacher-centric like our use of leading questions. Similarly, when we used our wikis like discussion boards and assigned discrete, deadline-driven drafts, we remained stuck in pre-wiki ideas about how students could collaborate and construct their texts online. Likewise, by not modeling for our students how to give peer feedback and engage in collaborative wiki-based revision, we left them to fall back upon what they knew how to do rather than showing them what they could do.
Lamb (2004) argued that wikis work best when they are part of a collaborative, constructivist pedagogy and argued for being willing to allow the creative chaos minimally structured wikis can let happen: "In a wiki, the instructor may set the stage or initiate interactions, but the medium works most effectively when students can assert meaningful autonomy over the process. It’s not that authority can’t be imposed on a wiki, but doing so undermines the effectiveness of the tool" (p. 45). Wikis invite teachers to give students the responsibility and the opportunity to take charge of their learning. As our experiences have shown, teachers need to be thoughtful in how they "set the stage" and "initiate interactions." Then, once students have a sense of what they can do with wikis, teachers need to get out of their way.
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