Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Example collaborative wiki projects

 The wiki expands as the grading period progresses. More and more detailed information is integrated into the wiki.  Students must consider the outline or organization of the material and where their contributions fit in. This provides benefits similar to concept mapping. By the end of the grading period the students have created a written representation of the topic which teachers can grade and give other feedback.

The teacher doesn't have to start with the course outline. She could start with one of the readings for the course. Students could elaborate on the arguments made in the reading.

Here's another possibility: imagine a class taking a field trip to the zoo and each student is assigned to write a report on one animal. The resulting wiki would contain descriptions of the zoo full of animals. In this example, the students aren’t collaborating on individual animal descriptions but each student can see the work of all of the others.

The “What I did on my summer vacation” assignment could be done as a wiki where entries are grouped by the type of activities described or by travel destinations.

Or let's say you have a long list of references on a topic such as climate change. Each student could be assigned the task of writing annotations on a set of the references. The result would be an extensive annotated bibliography, available to all.

There are as many possible wiki topics as there are course topics. You could start with a list of the Presidents, endangered species, insects, Shakespeare sonnets, applications of algebra, favorite pets -- the point is you can create a wiki about anything and make it an exercise in collaborative work.

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Keywords: wikis, collaborative learning