A Possible Wiki for Next Year's Classes

I've definitely heard more bad than good about Wikipedia, and I usually try to steer my students away from using it. If anything, I tell them to start there, but then to dig deeper to find better sources. So my initial impressions of wikis aren't that great. However, I'm starting to see the positive possibilities.

Last night in class, Richard Beach showed us several wikis created by students who've taken his classes in the past. And Rick has at least two of his own wikis. And we're going to be creating a wiki of our own, apparently. So what would my topic be? What would I really USE in my classes, and what might interest my students, and what might be able to "grow," from class to class, as new students add to the wiki and to the work of previous students?

I was already thinking about this during last week's reading. In the Beach, Anson, Breuch, and Swiss book, Engaging Students in Digital Writing (draft copy, 2008, p. 6), the authors write:

In his first-year composition course at St. Cloud State University, Matt Barton uses a wikibook, Rhetoric and Composition (en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition) to which students add material related to topics on rhetoric and composition. Barton finds that, rather than writing papers only for himself, his students are highly motivated to add material to this wikibook knowing that it is being employed by their peers and by [a] larger audience interested in composition.

At this point, I had an immediate topic: "Minnesota Literature." Of course, perhaps there's another one out there, but why can't there be two? And, this one would be primarily for me and my students, though anyone else out there could access it. At this point, however, I don't know if I would have it open access for people around the globe. I need to know more before decisions are made.

The reasons for this topic? First, my own interest in Minnesota Literature, going all the way back to Dr. Ronald Gower's Minnesota Literature course at Mankato State University in the Spring of 1992. And my past students have often reported that my interest in and love of literature in general is infectious and is definitely a positive part of the class.

Second, the community college where I teach has a fairly well established "visiting writers" program, going on 10 years now, where one or two Minnesota writers come to campus each semester to give a presentation. Before each presentation, our college loosely follows a "common book(s)" program, where as many faculty as possible assign the visiting writers' books in their classes, so students have already read and discussed the book(s), and maybe have even written about them, before the writers arrive.

This topic could then be the over-arching "theme" for my first-year writing courses. The first part of the semester could be spent reading the books, talking about them, writing about them (perhaps in Phases I and II as described in the Beach et. al. book), and beginning to gather resources. Rick describes some wikis where the high-school teacher has already gathered some resources for the wiki, to get students started. I could either do that, or let/make them do it. At this point, we'd be concentrating on research methods and skills, searching databases and the Internet, and maybe even starting to evaluate sources.

The second part of the semester could then be spent on further evaluation of the sources gathered, on gathering "multimedia" sources, perhaps including video of the visiting writers, on choosing and defining a "research" topic, and on proposing and planning the paper. The last third of the semester would be spent on the writing process of the required "argumentative research paper" for the course.

Sounds good to me so far! I wonder how my ideas will change over the course of this semester?