Wiki in the Classroom: Potentials Pitf

Wiki in the classroom:
potentials, pitfalls, plans

Introduction
● About me
● Andrew Famiglietti
– PhD American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State
University
– Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Tech
– Afamiglietti on twitter/afamiglietti@gmail.com
● Examples of wiki assignments
● Attempts to not only use wiki technology but emulate
Wikipedia community
● http://workingtropes.lcc.gatech.edu/
● http://buzzpedia.lcc.gatech.edu

Trace Pedagogy
● Based on “Trace Ethnography”
● Developed by R. Stuart Geiger (@staeiou) and David
Ribes in “The Work of Sustaining Wikipedia: The
Banning of a Vandal”
● “a way of generating rich accounts of interaction by
combining [...] analysis of the various “traces” that are
automatically recorded by the project's software
alongside an ethnographically-derived understanding
of the tools, techniques, practices, and procedures that
generate such traces”

Trace Pedagogy
● Students working in a wiki environment also leave
traces
● Examples: individual grammar edits made to a page, the record of
editing activity for a single student, discussions between
classmates working on the same page, class-wide design
discussions
● Traces can be used to guide & evaluate student writing
● Traces are available to instructor and other students

alike
● Focusing on traces focuses on process

A Recursive Composition Environment
● Students not only compose the text, they
compose the environment for composing the
text
● Examples: collaborative style guide, license and
deadline debates, CSS for overall site design,
extensions to enable new forms of content
● Both socially and technologically recursive
● Traces help keep track of this recursive
process

P2P Assignment Sharing
● Following the wiki tradition of sharing,
appropriation and reuse allows for
collaborative assignment development by
faculty
● Example: My Working Tropes wiki was the basis
for Robin Wharton's Body and Being wiki
● Traces allow for the process of revising and
customizing an assignment to be followed
and understood

Why a classroom is not a wiki
community
● Students don't self-select in the same way wiki
community members do
● Recursive process and trace-leaving will not happen “organically”
● Expect resistance to new composition mode from some students
● Students will take time to realize they have permission to change
each others work
● Commitment to project will be wildly uneven
● Convincing students to take on leadership roles can be challenging

Why a class emulating a wiki
community is not a normal class
● A recursive process disrupts the traditional class power
structure
● Don't romanticize this
● Assigning work and then evaluating results will likely
not be a satisfactory method
● Lead by example

Badges
● Stolen shamelessly from Alex Halavais
● Assignments are broken into small, discrete
tasks that students complete to earn badges
● Fits wiki process well because students can
design the larger composition process while still
meeting explicit goals
● Traces allow students to document their badge-
worthy activities easily

Tools and techniques for reading
wiki traces
● At current, options are conventional reading of
wiki logs and statistical techniques
● Better methods for qualitatively reading wiki
traces need to be developed
● Possibilities include: methods for visualizing user
activity, methods for comparing the state of different
wiki spaces at the same time

Final Thoughts
● Wikis give us the opportunity to create recursive
composition environments, and to trace student
actions in that environment
● We must be mindful of our unique role as
instructors in wiki assignments, and of the
distinctions between a wiki community and a
classroom
● Following the wiki tradition of sharing,
adaptation and reuse can allow faculty
collaboration on assignments

Wiki in the Classroom: Potentials Pitf

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Wiki in the Classroom: Potentials Pitf