Writing_with_Wikis

=Writing with Wikis= Facilitated by [|Troy Hicks]

Abstract
As we invite students to compose and collaborate in online spaces, wikis have emerged as a primary tool for writing. While wikis sometimes have a negative connotation in academic circles -- any discussion of Wikipedia will assuredly bring out a range of emotions in teachers and researchers -- the basic principles of wiki writing offers students many opportunities to draft, publish, and revise their work. Moreover, wikis provide opportunities for students to develop online communities, embed additional web-based media into their writing, and monitor their own work over time. This segment of our ACE workshop will invite you to become a wiki writer, seeing the possibilities for yourself and allowing you to set up your own class wiki in the process.

Opening Quote
from Haring-Smith, T. (1994). //Writing together: Collaborative learning in the writing classroom//. New York: HarperCollinsCollegePublishers.

Although there are many ways in which people can collaborate on a text, we will focus here on papers that involve more than one person contributing directly to the creation of a text and so sharing responsibility for it. This usually means that a number of people interact directly at some point during the production of the text. Most often, a group brainstorms and plans a document that is researched and drafted by one or more individuals working alone. Then the draft is revised and published by a group. Collaborative writing may also involve shared production and/or responsibility for a text, in which the group establishes the initial goals for the project and retains responsibility over the final text by revising it. Although one or more individual writers may actually draft the work, they are fulfilling the group's goals. (p. 360, "Defining Collaborative Writing")

[|Wikis in Plain English by the Common Craft Show] media type="youtube" key="-dnL00TdmLY" height="355" width="425"

Another Look at Collaboration
To think more about how collaboration is changing, here is a quote from Tapscott and Williams' recent book, [|Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything] to give you something concrete to think about as we imagine the workplaces of the future:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says, "When you say 'collaboration,' the average forty-five-year-old thinks they know what you're talking about--teams sitting down, having a nice conversation with nice objectives and a nice attitude. That's what collaboration means to most people."

We're talking about something dramatically different. The new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously. Sounds like a tall order. But the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can be mobilized to accomplish much more than one firm acting alone. Whether designing an airplane, assembling a motorcycle, or analyzing the human genome, the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming //the// defining competency for managers and firms. And in the years to come, this new mode of peer production will displace traditional corporation hierarchies as the key engine of wealth creation in the economy. (p. 18)


 * ==What are wikis?==
 * [|Educause's 7 Things You Should Know about Wikis]
 * [|Common Craft Show: Wikis in Plain English]
 * [|For Teachers New to Wikis]
 * ==What can I do with wikis?==
 * Hands On: Our Name Page
 * Teachers Using Wikis
 * ENG 315
 * Project WRITE
 * Red Cedar Writing Project Wiki
 * [|Aram Kabodian's 7th Grade Wiki]
 * [|Dawn Reed's English 11 Poets]
 * Examples of Educational Wikis
 * Haring-Smith suggests that collaborative writing can take many forms, from the traditional peer response/editing and brainstorming/planning that a group might do all the way through writing with one another. She defines collaborative writing in three ways:
 * **Serial writing** – in this mode of collaborative writing, a “train of individuals” works on a text. This could take the form of employees creating individual sections to a report that the supervisor compiles and sends out without further collaboration. From our perspective, this would be cooperation at its basic level. (p. 361-2)
 * **Compiled writing** – here, individuals all add components of the text and retain “some control over part of the final text” so the reader can tell who wrote what. This might be a collection of essays or poems. This would be a more advance form of cooperation, because all the parts have to fit, but there isn’t a great deal of negotiation among all the writers that goes into this kind of writing. (p. 362-3)
 * **Co-Authored writing** – in this type of writing, “it is difficult (indeed, often impossible) to distinguish the work of one writer from another.” In terms of how we are defining collaboration, this would be a text where all authors have a stake in what is said. There is often one facilitator here who coordinates the final draft of the text, but everyone is expected to contribute. (p. 363-5)
 * ==What are some concerns and critical approaches to using wikis?==
 * On the Media: [|Get Me ReWrite] (Story about Wikipedia)
 * Stephen Corbert's [|Wikiality]
 * Paul Allison's [|High School Online Collaborative Writing] and [|Screencast]
 * Rick Beach and colleagues' Engaging Students in Digital Writing Wiki: [|WikiWriting Page]
 * [|Journal of Online Education: Search for Wikis]
 * ==Where do I begin?==
 * [|Explore the Wiki Choice Matrix] and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each
 * Three Popular Educational Wiki Sites
 * [|Wikispaces Free K-12 wikis]
 * [|PBWiki]
 * [|Wetpaint]
 * ==Questions, comments, and wrap-up==
 * Use of Wikis In General
 * Pedagogical Uses of Wikis