Wikis and the Writing-Intensive Classroom
By Lauren Marsh
Helping students develop writing skills that are analytic as well as graceful is challenging. Helping them to write within the conventions of an unfamiliar discipline in a classroom of one hundred is more so. Assistant Professor Dennis Becker from the Department of Forest Resources introduced a wiki in his Natural Resource and Environmental Policy class, which is designated writing intensive, to support student writing. Students in his class worked in teams to produce policy briefs using UMWiki, a wiki tool supported by the University of Minnesota that enables them to collaboratively write and edit Web pages. Becker notes that students these days are typically juggling several group projects for different classes. His students appreciated how the wiki enabled them to share materials outside of the classroom and develop them asynchronously. He appreciated how the wiki enabled him to access successive archived drafts and see who made changes.
Of course, introducing a new technology into a classroom is bound to have unforeseen consequences. Becker and his students found that the wiki tool transformed the writing process itself. “As a policy person I’m always trying to find that 2,000- to 3,000-word document that distills the history and all the information about the policy together in one place, because I don’t have time to read five books on it.” Becker challenged his students to create such a resource. In the class wiki site he established links to individual group pages and created simple templates to structure the assignment. The assignment was developed in sections; each section had a deadline attached to it after which Becker reviewed the groups’ pages and inserted his comments.
The tool itself involved a learning curve. For instance, students working simultaneously on a text had to rectify versions. Even though everyone’s work was saved, the resulting text included numerous strikethroughs making it difficult to identify changes. In the future Becker will structure the assignment to accommodate the tool’s impact on the writing process. He’ll assign deadlines for adding revisions and then give groups a few more days to edit and clean up their pages.
Even more significant was that students didn’t bring to the assignment a set of collaborative writing skills. Becker’s approach is an interesting alternative to the peer review process that dominates writing classes. Instead of having students write a paper, get feedback from their peers, and revise accordingly, each member of his groups wrote a different section of the policy. Once they’d turned in a draft and received comments, they were assigned to edit another section, and couldn’t edit their own. Becker found that this challenged students’ assumptions about writing and authorship because they tended to be possessive of the text they initially wrote. But writing a real policy brief involves collaboration and negotiation, so Becker’s approach helped students to develop relevant skills in sharing responsibility for a text.
Working together using the wiki also enabled students to accomplish far more than any one of them could have alone. “They were impressed by the final document and the breadth of information they were able to pull together.” Becker plans to have future classes continue to develop the site so that “the information that the students pulled together would become a library of natural resource environmental policies that someone could visit to get a wide breadth of information.”
Another unforeseen consequence of introducing a wiki in his class was students’ increased sense of responsibility toward their audience. In the past his students weren’t “bashful about giving their opinions and being strong advocates for their position.” But tasked with writing “public” documents Becker noticed that their writing became “less biased and much more even handed and more factually based.” Which means his students have learned something about the crafting of real policy briefs.
