And I'm glad I could understand it, because this article has some significant things to say about the ways composition seems to viewing wikis as components of the writing class. And, although the article is overall pretty enthusiastic about the potential wikis have for writing students, from my perspective it is the "negative" things the authors have to say that I find most valuable.
Perhaps negative is a strong word. I'll say instead, "honest," which is what I marked several times in the margins of my article print-out. (On a related note, let me also add that online publishing is all well and good, but I will likely never become comfortable with reading longer articles on a computer screen. If for no other reason than I'd miss scrawling my marginalia.)
My first margin scrawl came toward the end of the introduction. I'm much more used to articles written largely to expound on successful classroom tools or practices, so I was a little taken aback to see the authors, who like wikis, admitting that their classroom successes could not be attributed "to our use of wikis." I was also at this point much less certain about what I would be reading over the next 29 pages of my print-out. (And let me tell you, I wasn't all that excited about reading 30 pages of Wikis: YAY!!! at the beginning. Ten or twenty pages, maybe, but 30 pages of pedagogical exuberance is pushing it for me, especially since I think the word "wiki" sounds like it should be the name of a candy bar.)The "Improving Skills" section also got an honest rating from me, for its discussion of a subject I find somewhat vexing: collaborative writing. Any teacher who says that every collaborative writing project they've ever assigned has resulted in sterling work and phenomenal student growth needs to contact me, 'cause I have some questions. Apparently Cleary et al do too, because they stated that "collaboration did not always result in improved writing." And while the authors don't necessarily attribute this failing to the use of wikis, they recognize that the wikis didn't solve it, a fact that runs contrary to the concept of wikis as the ultimate collaborative writing technology. As the authors later state, their previous understandings of wikis led to "overly inflated expectations," which were not met.
As much as I love their honesty (and I do, honest), I'm still critical--and perhaps cynical--enough that I found a point to nitpick. In the “Student Response to Wikis" section, the authors state:
"Because technically wikis are quite easy to use, we attribute (student) resistance to the challenge and anxiety generated by one more new thing to learn for non-traditional students for whom much of the college environment is already foreign as well as to the learner-centric nature of wikis, which gives students more responsibility for structuring their learning."
Let me unpack the problem I have with this section. A) Don't state categorically that anything is easy to use, because nothing is easy for everyone. Would you tell someone with dyslexia, "What's your problem? Reading is EASY!"???? B) People who don't find it easy, or just plain don't like it, dislike it because they aren't up for a challenge. And C) People who don't like wikis may also not like them because they are somehow more lazy than other students, and don't want to take the extra "responsibility" for their own learning. Ok, ok, I don't think the authors were intentionally stating that they thought non-traditional students were timid and lazy--in fact, anyone who has worked with non-traditional students pretty much knows that the timid and lazy never return to academia to BECOME non-traditional students. But I do think the authors were a little too desperate to defend their pedagogical work in the end, and tried to pass some of the blame for any failures onto their students. Next to the above quote, my own marginalia response to the authors states, "Hey, don't be mean."In conclusion, I think this article was valuable not just for its insights regarding the use of wikis as classroom writing tools, although the treatment and suggestions offered by the authors were logical and helpful. It was also useful as a "what-won't-work (necessarily)" discussion, which is something I haven't seen much of, all told. Even if they tried a little too hard to justify their wiki-work at the end, arguably at the expense of their students.
Amanda, I did the same. I marked the negative things that students said about their wiki experience AND I printed out the 30-page article! Obviously, I wasn’t that impressed with its online presence. :)
ReplyDeleteI acknowledge that wikis are viable tools for teaching and learning and that they are wonderful collaborative writing spaces, however, I couldn’t agree more with the student who said “that the wikis made [him/her] feel like class was never out of session.” I think that this sentiment has something to do with the idea of keeping up with every update, comment, etc. You can never reach a point where you can cross a wiki assignment off your to-do list! Sometimes, I think, students and teachers need a sense of closure.
I find it interesting that they defend wikis as easy to use and so don't attribute the difficulty of technology as a reason for resistance. In my own experience with teaching non-traditional students, they are not always as tech-savy as traditional students. So, even something like a wiki could be difficult for them. Some non-traditional students are quite a bit older and did not grow up with computers. (I remember once teaching a student who was a grandmother). I do, though, also appreciate the honesty we see in case studies like this.
ReplyDeleteI tried reading this one online, It did force me to comment on a separate sheet of paper and kind of estrange me slightly from interacting with the text in a way that I am fond of.
ReplyDeleteThe point that "nothing is easy for everyone" is very well taken. I think the greatest triumph of literacy studies to make a distinction between type pf knowledge, language and intelligence as largely geographically and culturally situated. It is a way of thinking that works against hierarchies of knowledge while still paying close attention to the environments that subjectivities both reflect and create.
To Lana's point, I did really like the attitude of "class never being out of session", indeed I think for us as teachers, it think it never is. You could also put me in the Freire camp and say that teachers must always be students first. How amazing is it that something like a wiki can change a students perceptions to fell like they are always learning (which is the sentiment, I feel, that is an unstated assumption of this statement).
And to Matt's point, that learning curve is a factor that must be considered. I really like D. Selfe's idea of creating a "knowledge-base" to help facilitate that difficulty. It works on so many levels: It affords agency, it humbles the educator/educand relationship, it encourages collaborative learning, it allow for a heuristic approach to see how knowledge can make a difference, it meets each student precisely where they are, and works to help develop themselves from precisely that point.
Great analysis Amanda. I also appreciated the honesty about using wikis in this text, and it actually makes it more likely that I will begin to use wikis as well as blogs which are already a regular part of my classes. I think a lot of that also has to do with the fact that this article, like D. Selfe's, didn't focus on using technology only as a major project that would replace a paper but as a learning/teaching tool that could be used to help teach many things besides multimodal compositions. This aspect of technology interests me much more than having my students compose videos.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure wikis are user friendly enough yet for easy use in the classroom, but I'm open to the idea, of course, I'm a bit of a collaboration skeptic, so I don't see myself incorporating wikis for that purpose, but I've thought about other ways to use wikis in classes. My current idea is as a forum for sharing research: posting great articles, having groups of students responsible to post main points of class discussions. In that way a class wiki could become a class knowledge production forum.