Using Wiki's for Group Projects - My First Time?!

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Permalink Reply by Anne Mirtschin on January 6, 2009 at 3:40pm

Hi Edward, you are certainly starting with a large group of students. Do you need to start them all at once as it is much easier to try getting one class on board at a time until you feel comfortable with the whole procedure? From my experience I would suggest you have one wiki as the administration becomes too time consuming. If you could ease in with one class and as confidence grows add the others, I feel that would be better. You can split your groups and have them post on the same wiki.
I have just finished being involved in the flatclassroom project which would have had in excess of your figures. Students were grouped into 11 different sections and grouped with students from other countries. It worked well, although there were a few issues along the way with text/pages etc disappearing. Have a look at that site and it might give you some ideas of what was accomplished and how it was set out. All the best.

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Permalink Reply by Rick Biche on January 6, 2009 at 6:59pm

I agree with Anne- more than one wiki adds a lot of click time. However, I have worked with a teacher that always does it that way. I think some of that decision depends on how the work will be split up between classes, although your project sounds pretty open-ended.

Take it slow. And watch how they use the wiki. Try to get them to put as much communication on the discussion tab as possible. My students found the mail feature so similar with IM that they embraced that initially and so we lost a lot of the record of learning and interaction.

With lots of people editing pages, stuff can get lost. While wikispaces has a way to deal with this I have found it useful to have a couple of students begin the wiki part of the project earlier than the rest and create an initial page with a lot of links to pages waiting to be filled in. Once that is done there is room for everyone to work. You could have lists of content for that page group generated to get you started. This might prevent some headaches your first time through.

Monitor everything you can. I use the recent changes link, watching the edits and discussion sections. That helps a greatly. I am currently running a site with almost 400 students (mwvsicencefair.wikispaces.com). One hundred eighty students will keep you busy- but it is awesome to watch how they learn together.

Good Luck!

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Permalink Reply by Jay Fogleman on January 6, 2009 at 7:52pm

Hi Edward,

Rick's advice is good and his science fair wikispace is a way-cool idea. His blog post provides more detail about how he used his first student wiki.

Since you're in the early stages of wiki use, I would add a couple of things to consider in your planning:

The first is to think about is how you anticipate students engaging with the wiki. I teach at the college level, and despite their "digital native" label, my students sometimes have mixed feelings about the wiki. My point is not to discourage you, but to be aware and not count on the online venue to "hook" everyone. (You should anticipate it having the opposite effect of some students.)

So what to do? Something that usually works for me is to provide students with a compelling reason for using the wiki. Why is this technology a good fit? How does it contribute to our "Grand Purpose?" For example, since your class is looking at recruitment practices, then you could present the wiki as the creation of a local resource that grows year after year. Have your students study the practices of some local companies so that they learn more about their community. Instead of starting from scratch, your could allow next year's students to either update/extend an existing entry or extend the collection of companies. The wiki-work then becomes a local resource that transcends being a class assignment. This type of vision increases student buy-in because they are doing something "real."

What ever you decide to do, keep us informed so we can learn from your efforts.
Good luck.

Jay

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Permalink Reply by Edward Wilson on January 7, 2009 at 6:55am

Excellent! This is the kind of stuff I need. Unfortunately, at this stage and considering how I organize my classes, it's hard to have one class doing one thing, and the other five another. I really like the idea of turning the Wiki into a resource for sharing information, where the students can track what they have already done as well as what they are planning for the future.

I'm going to start with just one per class (as I get better at them then perhaps I'll move onto one for my entire group!) Especially considering we are starting to talk about the interview process this term.

Thank-you and please keep the advice coming!

http://ejwilson.blogspot.com

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