One Wiki Two Classrooms

One Wiki, Two Classrooms, by David Elfving and Ericka Menchen-Trevino

This is a short chapter — just five pages. The authors write of their experiences using wikis in two different graduate level courses taken their first semester in the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Communication. One of these classes, Comm 502, generated more than 700 individual edits and nearly 100 pages of text, while the other class, Comm 500, did not have nearly as much edits or content. The authors of this chapter examine why this disparity might exist between two class wikis maintained and used by the same cohort of students.

The conclusion of the authors is that the social environment of the classes had more to do with wiki creation and use than anything else. The class that generated a lot of wiki text was very difficult and demanding, with an overwhelming list of readings to be accomplished each week. The class was told they had to collaborate. There was no way for each individual student to finish each task set out by the instructor. They needed to collaborate, and this led to the amount of collaborative wiki work they undertook that semester. They were graded on their participation in discussion each week, and this discussion was completely student-led. They needed each other and this wiki in order to stay of top of things.

In the other class, the discussion was instructor-led and the work was almost entirely individual work culminating in a research paper on a topic of each individual student's choosing. The impetus was not there to use the wiki very often — the students just didn't need it in the same way they needed it for the first class. In other words, wikis work well when they are needed to accomplish a task that would be difficult for an individual to complete on his or her own, but when imposed on work that can be easily undertaken in other ways, they do not have the same level of success.

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