A wiki conference for students. James Farmer shares a good-looking assignment that changes a tired old essay task into a wiki-based online conference. It would be nice to see an example of the results sometime. I'm guessing that it would work best if the students had warmed up a bit on a wiki, as he suggests.

I like the idea of giving students the criteria for evaluation, in step 3. This has at least two goals: to help them aim their papers toward the assignment's goals and to help them give feedback to others with those goals in mind. It might be one of the hardest habits for teachers to break -- giving assignments without clearly spelling out what we're trying to accomplish and how we'll know when we've done it. So it's good to see criteria mentioned here. I haven't seen or created a set of assignment criteria that include online exchange of ideas or feedback, but it needs to be done.

If the course is long enough, I'd consider having more than one conference, and having students run the second one. I would also consider asking students to write a memo advising students from later semesters how to get the most out of the conference assignment. [1 & P]