An Experience with Using a Wiki for a Collaborative Classroom Documentation Project
I’m teaching a basic web design course this term that covers design concepts, XHTML, and CSS. The students are from a variety of backgrounds – some have knowledge of HTML, some are non-majors or non-credit students looking to pick up a useful skill, and many are complete beginners who are required to take the course as part of their degree programs.
Only a few students knew what a wiki (distinct from Wikipedia) was before beginning this project. The students were given a month to make their contributions to the wiki. They were each assigned primary responsibility for one page at random, but were graded both on the success of their page and their contributions to other pages.
43 students across two sections of the class participated in the project. Of those, five (or 11.6%) didn’t participate by the due date, which is a higher than normal percentage for a homework project. Eleven (or 25.6%) contributed only to their own pages. Another thirteen (30.2%) maintained their own pages and made meaningful contributions to other pages, while fourteen students (32.6%) made numerous contributions well in excess of the requirements.
I will be continuing the project for the second phase of the class – CSS – and I’ll see if participation increases as the usefulness of the wiki as a resource increases. I also plan a project postmortem survey at the end of the course to see what the students thought about it.
4 comments
Hmm, interesting. Any idea why so many people failed to participate at all? Wikis seem pretty intuitive and non-intimidating to me, but then, I’m coming from a rather different perspective.
I suspect the lack of participation has more to do with the large amount of time between when the project was announced and when it was due than with the wiki. My theory is that they left it to the last minute and forgot about it.
I think this is a really cool concept and may be more successful in an upper-level class where the students are more experienced with the concept and have a better understanding of how working with many different people can make their own projects much easier.
Hi Hilary
Yours was a basic web design course, so I guess most if not all of your students were already interested in doing things online. How do you think it would work out if the course has been on a non-technical subject such as history or geography?
Mark
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