Wiki Project, Part I

My classes used wiki technology to create writings that were both group collaborations and individual reflections. Wikis allow users to create, edit, and monitor changes from any computer. Distance collaboration offers additional opportunities for group work, altering the boundaries between in-class work and out-of-class engagements. Similarly, wikis can be used so that they alter the boundaries between group and individual work.

Here is the link to one of the wikis: http://section56group3.wikispaces.com/

Students created group wiki pages that defined a particular writing construct and explored its impact on student writing practices. We developed an understanding of constructs by reading and reacting to articles in our course textbook Writing about Writing: In our class, constructs are concepts about writing that appear natural but are in fact created by social and cultural practices. Students related with Joseph William’s article “Phenomenology of Error” because of their past experiences with grading. The majority of the students felt that error was the dominant practice in the evaluation of student writing. Several groups in each section chose to write about error. Other groups chose writing constructs such as plagiarism, perspective, and writing itself. In some cases it wasn’t clear that the students understood their “construct” when they made these decisions. The process of building the wiki shows how their ideas developed.

The wiki writings were organized through home pages that defined the construct and its effects on student writing practices. Individual students linked additional pages to key words featured on the home page. These individual pages featured student narratives about personal encounters with the writing construct. In most cases these narratives developed a stronger articulation of how the construct works. As they analyzed their experiences, students appeared to understand what is at stake for their own literacy. The home pages, however, demonstrated a clearer definitional statement.

What I really like about these writings is how the dialogic voices of the individual writings support the group authored home page. You can use the “History” function to monitor all changes to the wiki. The times logged for each edit show that the collaborative work was nearly complete before the individual pages were created. The group first came to understand the construct through collaboration which then allowed individuals to write more analytical reflections about their own literacy experiences. The final result displays a unified consensus supported by individual expressions.

Multimodal Collaborations

One learning outcome in the First Year Writing curriculum at my university states that students should understand that meaning is socially constructed. I try to model this understanding by engaging students in activities in which the social interaction is conspicuous. Collaborative multimodal discussion can depict the social interactions that are part of the composition process.

The site www.voicethread.com offers the ability to create and publish multimodal discussions. One can upload any sort of document and then others can comment in several forms: text, webcam recording, and audio recording. My classes use this technology to share ideas about collaborative documents and for peer critiques. Another way I use Voicethread is to have students create and publish multimodal discussion in-class.

Since we do not meet in a computer lab, we use my laptop with students taking turns recording their understandings or questions about a class text. This method has one drawback due to the fact that I am logged in as the user: all comments appear to originate from my avatar. At first it is strange to see a student’s video emerge as an extension of my profile photo. This is actually an opportunity to explain the idea of literacy sponsorship. My user identity sponsors their use of the technology in a way similar to how teachers sponsor students’ discourse within the class. For me this is not ideal, but it allows us to collaborate in a non-lab classroom as well as talk about issues and problems with sponsorship.

Below is an example of a Voicethread collaboration that students created in the classroom. The students’ task was to address the three learning outcomes for our first three readings. They were asked to state ideas that they understood or ideas that they still needed to consider, share these in small groups, and enter a statement into our Voicethread discussion.



The artifact shows various levels of understanding. Some are uneasy statements read from spiral notebooks, while others are confident orations of complex ideas. Once we published the Voicethread, we observed it as a class. Students raised important questions about the multiple modes of discourse and the ways that each mode demonstrated authority. They also wondered whether the quality of a student groups’ understanding of a learning outcome affected the choice of mode. In fact, we raised many more questions than we answered. At this early time in the semester, that was more than OK. Students were working together to identify important lines of inquiry about the social aspects of discourse and writing technologies. In activities like this, students can clearly see their role in the ongoing research of rhetoric and composition.