Using a Wiki in My English 1121 Course

Despite being a teacher who gets irritated when my students don't follow my directions, I didn't do a very good job at all of following Rick Beach's directions this week. I set up my wiki first, before checking out other wikis or even doing the assigned reading. I used PBwiki to create my wiki, and my wiki's name is WritingMinnesota. Wiki. Wiki. ;-)

I set up my wiki first because, as you might have already read, I've already been toying with ideas in two previous blog posts and I was pretty much ready to go. I finally decided on "WritingMinnesota," mainly to tie it in with my community college's visiting writers program.

But also, just as a history class focuses on history, or just as a chemistry class focuses on chemistry, a writing class should focus on writing. And not just the students' writing either, as some writing-process advocates might argue (such as Donald Murray and Peter Elbow). Writing should be not only the process(es) writers use but also the "content" -- the study of "text" and how it works ... student text, professional-writers' text, printed text ... and now ... digital text or media ... in all its forms. We should be writing, and studying our own writing, and writing about writing.

So back to my wiki. It will probably end up being the new course website, and I will probably begin to reduce what I do and how I use my old website. The course I am going to begin my use of wikis with will be our college's college-level writing course: English 1121: College Writing and Critical Reading.

So what will the course look like? What will change, now that I've taken this course in digital writing? What will the students write? How will the students use the wiki to collaborate?

I'm guessing the first two papers for the course will be more in Phase I and Phase II (see Beach, et. al. on pages 9-11 and 17). At this point, the wiki might be used as Hendron describes on pages 184-188, where the collaboration is more in the form of students providing "models" for other students and of students providing "peer review" for other students.

After this, hopefully I would be helping my students shift into Phase III (and maybe Phase IV) where students form "Affinity Groups" (see Beach, et. al. page 47) as we move into the argumentation and research portion of the course. The affinity groups would be based on the type of Minnesota writing they would like to study -- e.g., a particular writer or a particular genre (such as sports journalism or children's literature).

I could see the third paper -- instead of a typical review of literature, or a synthesis paper, or an annotated bibliography -- be more about gathering the sources they will eventually use in their final papers. I could even see the third "paper" being something other than a paper, like, say, a PowerPoint production of the best sources they've found -- and, maybe, importing the PowerPoint into a VoiceThread, and then doing a voice-over, explaining the sources and how and why they are "good sources." These VoiceThreads could then be presented to the entire class, possibly for feedback, or maybe just for informative "fun." Obviously, this might have to be a group effort, and, obviously, this could get out-of-hand, overwhelming, and unwieldy, if I don't think it through more! The wiki, for this paper, would be the repository of all the sources they've found AND the place where they would collaborate on their PowerPoint and VoiceThread "scripts."

Finally, the fourth paper would be the "argumentative research paper," where the students would have to state and then defend some debatable thesis about the type of writing they've been studying.

This all sounds great on "paper," but how am I going to pull it off? Will it work? And how much work will it be? Will the students buy into it? Will the "guaranteed audience" of the wiki -- of either their peers or anyone surfing the web for information about Minnesota writing -- motivate the students to do their best, and to better understand purpose and audience, as Hendron suggests on page 188?

Or, will anything resembling "community building" serve to make the students rebel, or just not buy into it, as students might value the American ideal of "individualism" more, as Rebekah Nathan suggests in her book, My Freshman Year (2005). This increasing individualism in American society is also documented in Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone (2000).

Maybe individual blogs are the better answer? Ugh. No. Yes. No.