Ongoing Project Reports

Final Write Up



Week of April 22 through April 28

What did you do?
I got into the modules section of the community handbook for this wiki and discovered that I could add a module that listed all of the pages on this wiki, as well as who edited them last. I went ahead and created a page that lists and links to all of the pages I have created here (or that are just part of this wiki's layout). This is much, much easier than trying to keep track of what I am creating as I go. Hopefully, this page will help with navigating the site.

As a result of something that happened in the class that I am teaching, I also added Orphan a Page. My students seem to have trouble with this, so I included it in Possible Pitfalls. I went back in and created pages and wrote content for a couple of pages I had started as links in the text of other pages: Extend the Classroom and Keep Materials Organized. I also added more content to several other pages and worked a little bit more on Teach Writing as a Process Not Product. I finally got up the nerve to annotate a little bit of Dr. Morgan's chapter of the comp section of the wiki text I've been annotating. It's been a little nervewracking.
What went well?
Finding the code for the modules. That was fun. The community handbook was fun. And major time consumer. I had a little too much fun looking through those pages. Also, I have gotten better at writing about my own wiki experiences — I have gotten a lot more confident that I have something to say.
What gave you trouble? What did you do to address that trouble?
Time. Time and thesis troubles. I never have enough time to do everything I want to do with this. I kept getting interrupted during my work time this week. I also have panicking students right now, so that doesn't help with my time management issues, either.
What will you do next?
Frantically try to finish what I have already started in the next twenty-four hours. Should be interesting.

No, seriously, I plan to keep working on this even after the semester ends. The way I have been teaching keeps coming up in conversation with both my GA colleagues here and with my speech colleagues at the high school level. This wiki is a place for me to collect information I find, solidify my understanding and work out different ways of looking at things, as well as a place to send people that are really interested in teaching writing with a wiki. I have enjoyed my work here.
What did you learn?
I have more to say than I thought and I have learned a lot more than I realized about teaching with this technology. It has changed the way I teach. A student recently said that she enjoyed the collaborative nature of the class, and that she enjoyed "collaborative teaching like this." I have never thought of my teaching as collaborating with my students, but that is really what it is. Teaching with the wiki has brought that to the forefront of the class, and working on this wiki for this project has focused my understanding of her comments.

Pages worked on this week

Week of April 15 through April 21

Pages worked on this week

Week of April 8 through April 14

What did you do?
I focused a bit on making my wiki *prettier* and more user-friendly in anticipation of the studio tours that are coming up this week. I added a statement on the home page and tried to make the navigation of the page a little bit easier. I also re-vamped and cleaned up a few of the pages so that people might find the content more accessible. It had been a little sloppy, so this took more time than it probably should have.

Since this wiki has a tag cloud in the side bar, I decided to add a page describing How Tags Work. This might help noobies both navigate this site and use tags more effectively when they start using wikis in their classrooms. Also, with noobies in mind, I added some pretty basic information about wikis and how they work to the Wiki Basics page. I added to the Benefits page a bit, and started my own material reflecting on collaborative writing. I also continued to annotate the chapters of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. That has taken longer than I thought it would. I really should have known better. Theory is chewy.

Pages worked on this week
* How Tags Work
* Wiki Basics
* revamped Wikis in the College Composition Classroom
* Collaboration and Resistance in Wikis
* Agency and Accountability The Paradoxes of Wiki Discourse
* One Wiki, Two Classrooms
* Content and Commentary Parallel Structures of Organization and Interaction on Wikis
* Above and Below the Double Line Refactoring and That Old-Time Revision
* collaborative writing
* Benefits

What went well?
The wiki looks better on the front side. I think it is much more clear what is supposed to be going on here. I have less content on each page and separated some of the longer pages out onto several pages. At first I was just going to rely on 'table of contents' on each page to do this, but the fact is, people do not like scrolling. So now they have less scrolling to do. Whether or not it looks like it, I feel like the wiki is much more cohesive and better organized.

What gave you trouble? What did you do to address that trouble?
I feel like a broken record, but time was the biggest issue. Reading, understanding the stuff, and then annotating it takes time. The frustrating thing for me is that I am really interested in this topic and project, so I really want to focus on it, but other stuff keeps butting in.

To address it, I just kept plugging away when I had an hour here and there.

What will you do next?
Keep plugging away. Finish the pages I started this week and keep finding stuff, reading it, and then annotating it. I am finding good sources to link to in order to clarify ideas or references my users might be unfamiliar with, which I find delightful. It is very frustrating to me to read an article about instructional (or any other) theory and not understand half of the names or ideas referenced. With this wiki I can link to the pertinent information, so hopefully those users encountering that here find it less frustrating.

Week of April 1 through April 7

Pages worked on this week

What did you do?

I worked on the pages listed above. I started the first six and added to the last. I went back and reviewed my project proposal and realized I was going to add at least one node each week reflecting on my own practice teaching with wikis. Oops. So, I am behind on that. I have met the other objective I set — that of creating at least two new nodes each week, but fell short in writing anything about my own practice. So, that's a problem. I did include a link to my class wiki on the Examples of Course Wikis page, but that is it. I will need to remedy this in the next week. This week I noticed in my own class that the students doing well have, on average, twice as many revisions per page as the students that are floundering a bit. That could have been developed into something.

What gave you trouble? What did you do to address that trouble?
Time. I was really busy last week, which I knew was going to happen, so I had set aside Saturday and Sunday to work. I then ended up traveling to a funeral out of town this past weekend. This seems to be my semester of funerals. Anyway, where I was going had limited internet access, so that limited my online work time. I ended up printing off the online texts I wanted to read and bringing them with me so that I could at least get that much done.

I need more uninterrupted chunks of time to work. I need to find this. I need a TARDIS.

What went well?

Right now, not much. Other than I understood the theorists Vie and deWinter summarized. Last year I would have been lost. I guess I thought my annotation of their work went well.

What will you do next?
I really need to kick it into gear this upcoming week. I am behind where I wanted to be on my reading list at this point in the project, and I want to find more examples of course wikis. My plan for the next week is also to keep working through the Wikis in Composition and Communication Classrooms section from the Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom digital text. I will finish reading, annotating, and linking the information from that.

I will find the time.
What did you learn?
That I really need a TARDIS

Week of March 24 through March 31

Pages Worked on this week:

March 28. I have finally successfully embedded a video on wikidot. I feel accomplished.

I shifted the order of the questions based on how my week went…
What gave you trouble? What did you do to address that trouble?
I wasn't sure how to begin. I knew what I wanted to do, and I had planned out things in my proposal in a way that I thought would work, but got a little stuck nonetheless. I wasn't sure if I should just assume people arriving at this wiki would already know what a wiki was and how to use one, or if I should include that information. The trouble was that I did not have a good sense of my audience (or users, as the case may be). I needed to decide who I was doing this for. I was tempted to just start looking at information that Imight find useful, but my evangelizing side came out a little and I decided to back up and work on selling the idea of using a wiki to teach. My audience/users are writing instructors thinking about, but not quite sure about, using a wiki in their classes.

Anyway, I found a lovely lecture by Richard Buckland on youtube about using wikis to teach in the university and started there. Although not specifically about teaching writing, He really gives an in-depth look at using wikis, explains how they work, and gives a lot of examples regarding how he has used them over the eight year period preceding this 2009 lecture. Finding this and deciding to start there helped me get going.
What did you do?
I started a page titled Wiki Basics and then spent what felt like a tremendous amount of time trying to get the video to embed. The syntax page suggested I should be able to do this, so I really wanted to do it. It aggravated me.

Anyway, in the meantime I annotated the video and started some new pages based on concepts and ideas from his lecture. He gave me a structure to use to get this thing going, and so I thank you, Richard Buckland. Plus, he is fun to watch. After watching this video a few times, I realize I need to improve my lectures. His enthusiasm makes me look like a chump.

I started Wiki Nature, Possible Pitfalls and Benefits. I used notes from Buckland's lecture, information on c2.com, as well as my own observations to create content this week.

What went well?
I really needed to decide who my audience/users were. Once I did that and found Buckland's lecture and decided to start branching pages off of my annotation for that video, things started humming along.

What will you do next?
Finish creating content for the pages I started this past week. Then I will revisit my reading list and do the same thing (annotate and then branch pages off of that annotation or link further to these existing pages) for one or two of the articles I have listed there.
What did you learn?
Make a decision and keep moving.

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