PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 19, April 20, 2006

Wikis help teachers and students connect online

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by L. Brian Stauffer Wik-ed Norma Scagnoli, a visiting project coordinator in educational psychology, is studying creative uses of wikis, Web pages that allow readers to add and edit content, as course-management and instructional tools. Scagnoli has used wikis for class discussions and to create two Spanish-language books on blended learning with workshop participants living in Argentina and Costa Rica.

While public speaking is said to be most people’s number one fear, writing, at least for some people, can be equally disconcerting.

Joe Grohens, a lecturer in the department of English, said that many of the engineering, business and computer science students who take his business and technical writing class are comfortable crunching numbers, but find stringing words together to be daunting.

“These students all have huge writing apprehension,” Grohens said. “They’ve been told they can’t write. They’re good at math, but they don’t have many writing assignments. I want them to start feeling more confident in their writing.”

And Grohens has found a way to encourage students to write – and write well – by using a wiki (rhymes with “tricky”). A Hawaiian word for “quick,” wiki is defined as a Web site that permits visitors to edit the pages and that encourages collaborative writing and editing.

Grohens said he primarily uses the class wiki as a course-management system, to publish assignments and for students to post their work. Students like the wiki because it’s easy to revise their work and because they can work on their assignments anywhere they have a computer and Web access.

“The wiki enables me to give them lots of assignments and for them to write frequently, making it kind of a regular habit,” Grohens said. “The students feel like, ‘Oh, I can get started with something small and it’s not too painful, and I can come back to it later.’ ”

Grohens believes that the quality of students’ writing improves as a result of using the wiki because drafting and revision is so easy, and because they know that someone besides the instructors – their classmates – will be reading and critiquing nearly every assignment.

Grohens recently co-taught a brown-bag seminar about using wikis with Norma Scagnoli, a visiting project coordinator in educational psychology who uses wikis in a course she co-teaches with faculty member Tom Anderson as part of the department of educational psychology’s online master’s program. Scagnoli also is studying creative uses of wikis.

As part of an online workshop, Scagnoli’s students – who live in Costa Rica and Argentina – collaboratively wrote two books in Spanish on blended learning for kindergarten through 12th grade students.

“Next year, I teach the same workshop to students in Argentina, and they can work on the same wiki as my students in Mexico, although they were not in the course at the same time. Students can contribute to what students created during a previous semester. That’s what makes it so rich: working with people who are geographically and temporally dispersed,” Scagnoli said.

Some instructors, like Scagnoli, use wikis for class discussions, posting topic headings on pages and having students write on the topics of their choice.

One of the instructors Scagnoli studied uses a wiki to collaboratively develop the course syllabus with his students, to schedule students to bring in treats for the class and to host book exchanges, in addition to using it to post their work.

Grohens has found the wiki to be a time-saver. He previously taught the technical writing course, with similar assignments, using Blackboard to post assignments and for students to submit their work, which he then downloaded to review. By the end of the semester Grohens’ computer was glutted with files.

Grohens said he also spent a lot of class time teaching students the basic principles of HTML but now they can create their own Web pages easily using the wiki.

Grohens’ students create Web pages, post an introduction about themselves and then link their pages to the class page. The students create, edit and finalize their assignments on their pages, which Grohens said, “is much easier (for me) than retrieving a file.”

Wikis track changes made to the page, allowing the instructor to see each student’s contributions to projects and to compare different versions of a project side by side.

One of the primary reservations instructors have about wikis is accountability: How do they know that a student – and not someone else – actually wrote the material? But that’s also a problem with any writing assignment done outside of class, Scagnoli said.

Some wikis have people who monitor them and alert the monitor to changes. If the wiki is on a public-access server, plagiarism and incorrect information may be uncovered by people surfing the Web. In any event, the wiki assignments should be only one method of assessing students’ learning, Scagnoli said.

Wikis also can be protected to prevent people from editing them, which Grohens began doing to the home page of his class wiki after spammers vandalized it several times.

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