Reason #1: When you quickly repeat the word (e.g., “Wiki Wiki Wiki”) it sounds like the noise generated when DJs “scratch” records. Really, I’m not crazy, check it out:
Alright, maybe it’s just me.
Reason #2: I have actually ridden on THE wiki’s namesake; the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport that quickly and frequently caries passengers between the main concourse and various gates (“Wiki Wiki Shuttle,” Wikipedia).
I decided to design my wiki (http://ci5475digitalwriting.pbworks.com/) as a place to…
1.) Keep a cumulative record of the technologies I learn and use throughout the course of the class.
Because my primary reason for taking this course was to learn and practice using technologies in my current and future teaching practices, it is important for me to organize the many, many, specific tools I am being introduced to (as well as often re-introduced to through educational vs. leisurely purposes!), in ONE universally accessible place. Although I similarly organize all of these technologies via my personal laptop, I find it EXTREMELY useful to have access to these technologies via the wiki which is NOT bound by time, space, and the myriad of other constraints to which my personal computer is bound. In other words, where I could possibly forgot, damage, or otherwise lack a working laptop for whatever reason, the wiki affords 24 hour access to whatever I choose to publish provided there is a working internet connection.
With this purpose in mind, I have devoted a sidebar category to “Major Technologies Learned / Used.” When clicked on, this category takes the viewer to yet another page that breaks down EACH major technology covered in the class thus far (e.g., blogs, RSS feeds, digital note taking, digital mapping, vlogs, social bookmarking, social networking, visual rhetoric, wikis, and more to come!). Each of these categories then link to subsequent pages where the viewer can find external links to the specific web-based technologies learned throughout the class. For example, the “Blogs” category links to yet another page with a collection of external links to popular blog hosting sites including Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, and additional free hosting sites that I have discovered and explored on my own.
2.) Brainstorm and actually complete my final project for the course.
In addition to giving me a universally accessible place to brainstorm final project ideas, the wiki environment also affords me the ability to “map out,” build, and revise my final project before publishing a final draft to the internet.
With this purpose in mind, I have devoted a sidebar category to “Final Project Ideas,” which then further breaks down into 2 pages devoted to brainstorming and exploring the use of Facebook and Ning as affording critical character analysis and perspective taking respectively. After thinking through these ideas and tentatively settling on the Facebook option (see wiki page for more specific details), I have constructed yet another page as a sort of “template” with which I can begin to design and revise my final project. While designing this “template,” it was my purpose to reproduce the elements of a standard Facebook page as closely as possible to act as temporary holding stations until the revised material can be transferred to an actual, live Facebook page. In other words, Facebook-specific subcategories including basic information, personal information, contact information, education and work, groups, photos, and video have been reproduced in the wiki environment to store material until it is ready for transfer to actual, live Facebook pages.
3.) Store and organize my assigned blog posts and response.
In addition to storing my completed work on my personal computer, I have found it EXTREMELY useful to store material in a remote, universally accessible environment. After all, you never know when technical difficulties are going to render your personal machine useless!
With this purpose in mind, I have devoted sidebar categories to “Blog Posts” and “Blog Comments” where I am storing, you guessed it, my cumulative blog responses, as well as my comments to my “blog buddy.”
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In terms of wiki-based collaborative writing activities, I really like Richardson's idea of having students contribute chapters and content to a class and/or group wiki-book. In fact, I have had a very positive personal experience with such an activity...
For the 08 / 09 English Ed. cohort’s writing methods course occurring last Spring semester, our instructor assigned a total of 4 texts on teaching writing for the class to read. However, due to student teaching taking up the second half of Spring semester, our class was under an 8 week time constraint to learn and process all of this material! In order to distribute the work load, communicate the most useful content, and meet our overall learning goals in such a tight period of time, our instructor designed the following collaborative writing project:
-Because there were 4 books total, the instructor split us up into 4 groups; 1 group per text.
*Mechanically Inclined – Jeff Anderson
*Papers Papers Papers! – Carol Jago
*After the END: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision – Barry Lane
*Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices – Ralph Fletcher
Then, each group was responsible for…
-Critically reading and becoming “experts” with their text.
-Creating a wiki chapter containing important information across each text to share with the rest of the class. Although there was a large amount of creative freedom each group was encouraged to utilize while designing their wiki chapters, our instructor recommended the use of the following categories:
*Bibliographic Information
*Short Summary
*Powerful Quotes
*Video and Images
*Book Review
*Useful Links
-Presenting their wiki chapters to the class.
The actual wiki-chapters our class created are still live at the bellow link. Check them out to get a more detailed look at the collaborative process I’m describing!
http://ci5461teachingwriting2009.pbworks.com/Book-Study-Group-Wiki-Chapters
By the end of our short 8 weeks, I perceived this assignment to be VERY useful in giving the entire class a relatively detailed overview of what was covered in each text, as well as providing where to look if additional information was later desired. And the best part is that these chapters are still live to view if I ever want / need to return to them during my teaching!
In short, I feel as though this type of collaborative writing activity would be a GREAT way to engage students, make them mini “experts” on the material, and cover a MUCH wider variety of material in a shorter time frame. And students don’t have to use textbooks either. This same sort of work could be done with novels in reading workshop groups. For example, using / modifying the above categories (e.g., bibliographic summary, short summary, powerful quotes, videos and images, book review, useful links), students could break off into groups, read a variety of books, and share their finding with the rest of the class view a wiki-book. Really, whatever students are reading is far game for this sort of collaborative writing activity!
Also, I'd like to quickly discuss the Skype plugin that I encountered while playing around with my wiki. Basically, if you don't already use Skype, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Once you download, install, and register for a FREE username with Skype, you are ready to make calls to ANY OTHER Skype user, from ANYWHERE on the face of the planet, for FREE. Also, for a
VERY small fee (I think I pay 23$ / year), you can purchase a telephone number to be associated with your Skype username that can be used to call make UNLIMITED calls to any land line or mobile number. In fact, the service is so cheap and works so well that I have discontinued my traditional telephone service, instead purchasing a Skype phone that sits on my kitchen counter, makes the same calls with the same quality, but for a FRACTION of the price.Aside from Skype just being awesome, PBWorks allows you to embed a Skype "Call Me" button on a wiki page. Just think of the teaching and learning implications here. Because the basic service is free (e.g., making Skype-to-Skype calls), you could create a class Skype account, embed it on the wiki, and have your students "call in" to the wiki to leave audio feedback, pose questions, and so on. Or, if you don't mind parting with 25$ / year, you can have an actual telephone # associated with this class Skype account that students could call into if they don't have access to a machine with Skype installed at home.
Or, students could create their own personal basic Skype accounts, and teachers and students could leave audio feedback back and forth on each others accounts!
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COLLABORATIVE WRITING CHALLENGES
Similar to pretty much every piece of technology we have discussed so far throughout this course, there is the issue of access, both in the school as well as at home, that has the potential to create problems when considering collaborative writing activities. For example, many, many schools either block access to wiki sites via filters, lack the necessary computers to access these sites, and/or otherwise have policies and assumptions in place that fear vs. favor collaborative writing. Combine these in school issues with the potential lack of resources and negative assumptions toward "playing on the computer" at home, and teachers have some problems to address before they can seamlessly incorporate wiki-books in our classes.
Also, in our current education system, many teachers have yet to adopt the idea that texts no longer function as discrete objects with discrete authors (Beach et. al., 98). Instead, many teachers STILL teach writing via the paradigm that writing acts are DISCRETE and highly INDIVIDUALIZED, neglecting to consider the larger social, cultural, and so on networks responsible for the creation and transmission of ideas. As such, asking students to not only look to each other for help, but to absolutely DEPEND on each others' contributions to the writing act may initially feel like a very awkward and subversive task.
IMAGES USED
http://www.online.uillinois.edu/oakley/presentations/WikiBus1.jpg
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/technology/skype.jpg
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