by Jim Brown, Assistant Director, CWRL

Software: pbwiki: www.pbwiki.com (free, web-based wiki service)

Goals: In creating wiki entries for new and interesting terms/concepts, this assignment aims to: 1) build a community knowledge base; 2) encourage collaboration; 3) Get students to do research on unfamiliar terms/concepts that they encounter; 4) get students to go beyond peer review and consider how to edit someone else's writing.

This is a semester long assignment that has students create wiki entries for unfamiliar or interesting concepts that they come upon in their reading. Instructors can require a certain number of entries per week (this is suggested). A wiki can get students to respond to what they read with a purpose - this assignment was originally conceived as a replacement to reading responses, forum posts, or blog posts. While these other forms of response can work well, they can also become stale. My students began to merely go through the motions with blog posts, and a wiki attempts to give students more of a purpose to their smaller, daily writing activities.

Some things to think about when building a classroom wiki:

1) Finding a wiki service.
I chose pbwiki because it's free and easy. There are others out there, but a number of them only allow you to create a certain number of pages before they start to charge monthly fees. PBWiki offers lots of features for free.

If you decide to use a wiki, you'll want to discuss with students why you've decided to make this a part of the course. For instance, discuss the differences between a wiki and some more "stable" texts (such as books, journal articles, etc.) Remind them that wikis are a different genre of composition and collaboration. Explain that it's a way to help others in the class with difficult, new, or interesting concepts. Remind them that their audience is others in the class, and if you decide to make your wiki public make them aware that the wiki is open to anyone surfing the web. Without this discussion, students might not quite understand why they're contributing to this resource.

Here's the pbwiki I created: http://e314j.pbwiki.com/

2) Give students a template
Create a template for wiki entries. This makes entries uniform and easier to read.

Here's the template I created:
http://e314j.pbwiki.com/Template%20for%20wiki%20entries

3) Develop rules and guidelines
Do you want students to edit entries that others have submitted? How do you want those edits to be formatted? What are the rules of your wiki. Make sure to set these at the beginning to avoid confusion.

Here are the guidelines I set for our class wiki:
http://e314j.pbwiki.com/Guidelines%20for%20editing%20entries

Explain how to use the wiki
Show students how to search the wiki - in pbwiki there's a search box in the upper right hand corner. Provide a link to "all pages" - this gives students an index of all pages submitted by their classmates.

The index page for my pbwiki is:
http://e314j.pbwiki.com/AllPages