Some Practical Tips on Teaching Wikis

Some notes from a session last night of teaching students to use wikis, each of which is designed to get them out of the long ingrained habits of individual authorship and more in tune with the wiki way:

Assign them not just to write, but to create links and edit each other

When left to their own devices, each will write their own articles. An article whose history shows only a single author is a failure in a wiki; it is not collaborative.

As a teacher, you may very well simply have to assign them the tasks of making wiki links to the articles of others, including articles inherited from previous students.

Making links to external web sites is common for  students, but wikis grow in strength through frequent internal linking as much as simply adding more text. Assign and encourage internal links and cross editing.

Good enough is good enough

Wikis show the process. That is not only okay, but should be encouraged.

For example, draft articles should not be copied to real articles, but edited in place; wanted pages and links without pages are perfectly okay, and in fact, a useful tool to help indicate what work needs to be done.

The habits of individual authorship, especially in the Humanities, privilege a perfect product. Wikis are not about that.

Consider looking at all the drafts publicly as they go along no matter the state they are in.

Showing process in writing is one of the most important parts of learning to write, as opposed to learning to read critically. Show me T.S. Eliot's drafts or Hemingway's notebooks or Picasso's sketches. Show me how they did it.

Wiki as Collaborative Portfolio

When students go out into the real world, they will have a portfolio of individual work. But the corporate world of today wants and needs people who can collaborate and work effectively in teams.

Every job interviewer will ask questions about that, because technology driven business is and must be highly collaborative to get even the basics done. Adam Smith's dream of a world of small shopkeepers has gone the way of the Tierra del Fuegans.

A wiki is one way that students can show how they can successfully work in a collaborative, team centered way. By showing not just the final product, but the history of their contributions of editing and linking, they can demonstrate -- rather than just talk about -- how they can work in a group and work with current social centered technology.

Also, an important contribution to a wiki may not be the writing of text, but the organizing of text: editing, categorizing, consolidating, rearranging, repurposing, understanding the relationships between disparate resources and how to align them.

And that is much more what management is concerned with in the real world, rather than creation of content de novo.