Comments on: Reflection on Students’ First Wiki Experience

By: Rick Biche

Rick Biche — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:50:20 +0000

Ted,
You asked specifically about the interaction and dialogue. If your students are in the same class at the same time, they may feel that additional online communication is unnecessary. I have found this to be the case in my classes. If I use a separate wiki for each class, there is little discussion in the discussion tab. This isn’t necessarily bad, if the point is to discuss and reflect and they are doing that in class then all’s well.

I don’t know how you have set up the assignments but one thing that has helped here is to assign each student a number of topics of primary responsibility and a few of minor responsibility. Don’t group the kids for this. That way each student has a different set of students to collaborate with for each topic. They also have some areas they are less familiar with and might be prone to ask questions.

You could try to do a day, or fraction of a class where you switch into “read-only” mode. Send the students to the site to look for holes. They should look for Big Holes- totally missing areas, and Little Holes- current content missing details. During “read-only” mode, they can add discussion comments and questions. That way they can move quickly through content, add feedback and move on without having to remember what they found. And along the way, they have read the site, a nice plus.

I saw a link for blogs. From what I have seen from the graphic on the home page, I would think that blogs would be a great platform for the class. Actually a combination of blogs for reflection and wiki for the authentic resource might work very well.

By: Ted Wilson

Ted Wilson — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:41:22 +0000

Hey Rick,

So far I’m into class number 3 with my groups working on their Wikis, and I’m wondering if you could take a look and give me some pointers. I’ve been giving the kids lots of opportunity to communicate and reflect, but sometimes it is difficult to force those things. Any suggestions?

Also if you want to take a look here’s an example of what one of my classes is producing:

http://lbphspop-05-2009.wikispaces.com/

Thanks,

By: Claire Thompson

Claire Thompson — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:20:38 +0000

Thanks for the links Rick!

By: Rick Biche

Rick Biche — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:49:53 +0000

@Claire More wikis? Absolutely. I find wikis fit into science very well. First, be sure to check out our science fair wiki. We will be doing some work on next so you could watch this one from the beginning.

By: Claire Thompson

Claire Thompson — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:41:50 +0000

I haven’t used wikis yet with students, so it was interesting to read your experiences on the students’ first wiki project. Do you have plans for these students to do another wiki project? How did they like using the wikis?

By: Matt Wiseley

Matt Wiseley — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:39:37 +0000

It’s interesting to read about the heavy use of the “wiki mail” feature. I’ve heard this from other teachers as well, and my suggestion would be to start off any wiki project with the goal of keeping all content within the wiki. One of the main strengths of a wiki is collaborative editing, and what that provides is a form of messaging within the content. In other words, don’t suggest a change… make it! Everyone can see who changed what, and that’s the conversation. You end up with real content instead of a lot of discussion about it.