I'm thinking of asking students to contribute an article to Wikipedia this semester -- has anyone tried this with a class? We'd want to study the site and describe the traits of an excellent piece there, then work through some drafts. All in keeping with my new goal of making something of use to others in every class. Stop assigning things meant to be thrown away at the end of the semester, I tell myself, or at least cut back on that practice.
I assigned writing wikipedia articles to some of my high school students a year ago. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBU for an example. I didn't spend much time prepping the kids on things like "neutral point of view". I found actually that the wikipedia community pretty effectively enforced that.
I agree that the impetus for doing this is to contribute something real and ongoing, not just do exercises that get thrown away at the end of a term.
Thanks for the link to the piece by your students -- it reads well and shows some real research went into the writing. The edit trail also shows, as you say, the Wikipedia community taking an active roll, which is impressive.
I tried something rather similar, but arguably less intimidating: writing on Wikitravel. I figured that it wouldn't be too difficult for students to write something about their local area. Also, because Wikitravel is newer than Wikipedia, almost anything the students would be interested in writing would be new. This served as partial justification for the relatively immature writing, as I decided that even very limited or poorly written information about a place was better than none at all. Subsequently, I've noticed that some of the pages students created have become much better; I'd like to think that their efforts encouraged other people to contribute their knowledge and editing skills to wikitravel.
I think in future years I'll have to think more carefully about how to prepare students for the assignment, but I certainly intend to continue doing it. A few students expressed wonderment that they were actually contributing something new to a resource available worldwide.
Most of my students' work is at the following page and the pages linked to from it:
http://wikitravel.org/en/article/Kumamoto
Rick, thanks for suggesting Wikitravel -- that's a good idea.
Your comment about students expressing wonderment over the fact that they were contributing to a world-wide resource is an important reminder of how blandly we all accept the custom of giving assignments that are meant to be filed away or thrown away. It's common sense among teachers to assign that kind of work, but we need to change the common sense and help ourselves and our students see another kind of work as normal -- work that creates knowledge, work that performs a service to self and others, work that endures.
Our students will experience enough alienation in their lives as workers -- we don't need to add to it with our thoughtless and outdated pedagogical customs.
One of the slightly scary things about having the students post on publicly-generated content site like Wikipedia is you're not sure how the community is going to react to the (inevitably not the most mature/polished) offerings of our students. It'd be a shame for them to get slammed repeatedly... one of my students kept getting her posts wiped by someone else, i.e., the other person kept reverting back to their previous version, or would keep overwriting what she had to say.
If the teacher steps in, in that case,
(oops hit submit too soon)
If the teacher steps in, in that case, and tells the heckler or over-earnest community person or whoever something along the lines of, "Look, this is just a high school student, so for the sake of her learning, cut her a break. " ...then that intervention can be 'undermining' in various ways. Direct intervention can wind up inadvertently saying to the student, "You can't really hold your own in an open community of ideas/content, so I have to protect you and your lame writing from fair competition." It can inadvertently say, "Look, this assignment wasn't really real anyway." This is a bad twist because you presumably originally presented the assignment as real content with a real audience and therefore worth real effort. And direct teacher intervention, at least in the form of cajoling others to cut the student some slack, is not necessarily the best thing for the content-community either. Most people on there (at least in Wikipedia's case) I think are honestly trying to produce the best "product" they can, not just grinding axes. Since the energetic editor often has a valid point, from the perspective of improving the article quality, in erasing a sophomoric addition by a sophomore, it is hard to say, look just let them contribute something so they feel good about themselves. If what the student has to contribute really isn't all that great, then in the competitive marketplace of ideas/memes, why shouldn't it get naturally-selected out.
Faced with these issues, the choice I made in class last year was to work with the students to get their writing as good as possible, but keep my own posting to an absolute minimum (usually just to clean up stuff like spelling that I wasn't emphasizing with this group of kids), and not directly interacting with any other wikipedia writers at all. Nobody knew for sure that these were students, although some probably inferred from the writing style. Given this strategy -- the result even after extensive coaching and prodding, just wasn't good enough for the community to tolerate in some cases. The students in those cases naturally didn't feel as good about their effort as others whose contributions were retained by the community.
One thing to be said for the usual "throw-away" assignments, is they take place in a sheltered cove -- just the teacher and the student, usually, are seeing that work, so the stakes are low, it's safer to make mistakes, and it's relatively easy to be encouraging. When contributing to a larger project, it's a much bigger fishbowl.
Not that I'm arguing at all for the "throw-away" style. The issues I mentioned above are just some delicate aspects of a community-writing approach to consider when deploying it in a class setting.
Tim, these are very helpful comments. I was thinking of working with students at some length before we might agree that a posting was ready to submit to Wikipedia, knowing even then that more revision would almost certainly take place.
I could also see a role for a student editorial board that advises whether or not a classmate's draft is ready to take a chance in the deeper water outside the class.
We are properly obliged to find a balance between protecting students and challenging them, and you've explained well some of the risks of open posting. Thanks again.
Editorial review sounds like a good idea.
You might even run a local version of the article on your own wiki for a week and have the class serve as its own editorial community before re-publishing (just via copy-paste) to the real Wikipedia for wider review.
Another idea to possibly pursue in parallel is to have friendly adult mentors who know about your project join in the discussion about how to improve given student articles. They could write editorial commentary in the "Discuss This Page" area. Students could engage these friendly community members in that discussion and follow up with a revision along the lines discussed. If, after x number of stabs at it, the students just aren't getting the point well enough for you to let it go, then the mentor could do a rewrite, and you could go over the diff in class, have the students comment in writing on what they think of the mentor-member's version, whether it's an improvement or not in their opinion, etc.
If you went this route, you could write up a briefing paper that helped the mentors understand what your angle is. E.g., maybe for this particular set of articles you are emphasizing NPOV, or accounting for multiple perspectives, or careful research & annotation, or logical structure, etc. Then the mentors could focus on those angles, so as not to overwhelm the students with too many helpful suggestions from too many directions.
This approach of seeding the community with "sensitive allies" would create an intermediate bridge between the safety/dullness of the same old people interacting in class versus the risk/excitement of the unknown big community.
Of course, you could serve as the sole such mentor-person yourself if you can't find anyone else, or if you think actively pulling other people in like that is artificial. But pulling other people in strikes me as potentially a good approach because it naturally puts you more into the position of coach, facilitating an interaction between the students, in their role here as writers, and other writers out there. Otherwise, if it's just you running the show as "The Adult", it's hard to escape some tinge of the same old, "I'm the teacher, I know how to do this, you go on and try it, and I personally, because I know so much, am going to point out where you are wrong, and you will try again until I think you're right." Some element of that is inescapable probably, but pulling more people in makes the whole thing less an exercise in individual authority and more of an inclusive, consensus activity: this is what a lot of smart, honest people out there think is a clear and useful style of expression. It's not just me as the teacher, getting excited about writing in the usual lame teacher-ish way (read: getting more excited about some boring academic thing than anyone else in the room is) and thereby seeming to the kids like a complete dork.
There's some analogy here to the appeal of blogs, especially more recently as they have become seen as grassroots journalism -- any single person's blog is highly biased and unreliable, but dozens or hundreds or thousands of them start to converge on something authentic and verifiable, in a sense beyond what any one person's voice, no matter how articulate and passionate, could achieve alone.
If you went this route, you could write up a briefing paper that helped the mentors understand what your angle is. E.g., maybe for this particular set of articles you are emphasizing NPOV, or accounting for multiple perspectives, or careful research & annotation, or logical structure, etc. Then the mentors could focus on those angles, so as not to overwhelm the students with too many helpful suggestions from too many directions.
This approach of seeding the community with "sensitive allies" would create an intermediate bridge between the safety/dullness of the same old people interacting in class versus the risk/excitement of the unknown big community.
Of course, you could serve as the sole such mentor-person yourself if you can't find anyone else, or if you think actively pulling other people in like that is artificial. But pulling other people in strikes me as potentially a good approach because it naturally puts you more into the position of coach, facilitating an interaction between the students, in their role here as writers, and other writers out there. Otherwise, if it's just you running the show as "The Adult", it's hard to escape some tinge of the same old, "I'm the teacher, I know how to do this, you go on and try it, and I personally, because I know so much, am going to point out where you are wrong, and you will try again until I think you're right." Some element of that is inescapable probably, but pulling more people in makes the whole thing less an exercise in individual authority and more of an inclusive, consensus activity: this is what a lot of smart, honest people out there think is a clear and useful style of expression. It's not just me as the teacher, getting excited about writing in the usual lame teacher-ish way (read: getting more excited about some boring academic thing than anyone else in the room is) and thereby seeming to the kids like a complete dork.
There's some analogy here to the appeal of blogs, especially more recently as they have become seen as grassroots journalism -- any single person's blog is highly biased and unreliable, but dozens or hundreds or thousands of them start to converge on something authentic and verifiable, in a sense beyond what any one person's voice, no matter how articulate and passionate, could achieve alone.
Since the discussion has veered onto blogs, I've been planning to make writing a blog the main, ongoing assignment for the 2nd semester of my writing course. A colleague thinks that the risks involved (e.g. getting flamed) are too great. It seems to me that wiki contributions, while highly public, are fairly safe because they're largely anonymous, while blogs are by their nature very personal and therefore more exposed to "danger". Do you have any perspective on this?
Tim, you've written a very nice article here in your series of comments -- I hope you'll cut and paste them back into your own files and do something further with these ideas. Having a class wiki serve as a warm-up site for eventual Wikipedia work is very good, I think, and so is the community board of experts.
[This reminds me that my wife heard a strong paper at a conference about linking high school students with police officers in Iowa City (I believe), with each pair reading the same book and having occasional discussions about the book.]
Rick, I worry about students and flaming, but I also think the main risk factors are probably these:
1. If you enter a conversation among bloggers with a history of flaming, you much increase the odds. Eg. if you run with Dave Winer's set, your chances go up.
2. If you behave like someone who flames, you will attract others who behave that way.
3. If you do sloppy work, you might hear about it in a tone that is a bit less than generous. That's my experience, anyway, and I found it to be a good lesson for me.
So I think the risk is fairly small if we are strategic about our projects and if we behave ourselves too. Maybe, however, I'm just reflecting the good vibes I run into generally in the edublog community.
Ken, thanks for the advice. No. 3 worries me a little, as even EFL students who have tried very hard may seem sloppy to some native speakers. And I wouldn't want even the genuinely sloppy work to be attacked. But maybe your 1 and 2 are the key things to remember here. Would you recommend that teachers use a public blogging service (and if so what?) or using their own webspace, which isn't actively sealed off from the outside world but doesn't need to actively attract attention to itself?
I'd like to echo your comment to Tim, who's basically contributed a nice mini-essay here. I've been thinking about how to use class wikis effectively, and his comments have given me some nice ideas.
This exchange reminds me of an interesting comment on cogdogblog by Stephen Downes, who says that blog comments aren't a suitable venue for discussions. As far as I recall, he thinks that Tim's ideas belong in Tim's space, but should be linked to Ken's original post by rss. This would certainly save the effort of copying and pasting, but would the forum-like quality of this blog be lost in the process?
To introduce students to the concept of WikiWords (but not wikis themselves), I have them each create a simple, static website using VoodooPad, a cheap notepad application for MacOS X that uses wiki links as its basic organizing principle. (WikidPad appears to be an equivalent progamme for Windows.) Students create new pages by typing a WikiWord, and export as HTML when they've finished.
Rick, you're right about the vulnerability of EFL students to people who leap to conclusions about how language acquisition works or don't even imagine such a thing is going on. They must experience so much impatience from others, for one thing.
I don't have a recommendation about where to host the blogs. People like Will, working in the extra constraints of high schools, seem to run into the complications of these issues more quicky than I have. I hosted some things for students until I got the university to buy ExpressionEngine; I'm still hosting some wiki space for my students and my colleagues, but colleagues like the wiki and want the university to host that too, so maybe I'll be free of that duty soon too.
I like students to be able to walk away with their sites intact at the end of a course, but I also like the school to stand by what I'm doing and put an official mark on our activities and protect us somewhat from invasive attacks -- so I'm pulled in contradictory ways on that.
I should get Trackback going on this site, too, as an aid to conversation, though I think I have to upgrade the software to do so. I know I appreciate the feature elsewhere. If people are going to do something with their writing instead of letting it slip down the screen into the archive, then it probably matters more where it is located.
Thanks for the VoodooPad and Wikidpad tips.