wiki as pedagogical tool: part two (ci.5410.7)
To continue with my previous thinking on the wiki as a teaching tool, I've decided to try to use the wiki as a collaborative ongoing text. Much inspired by Matt Barton's students from St. Cloud State University do with their course wiki Rhetoric and Composition: A Guide for the College Writer, I would like to have the teachers develop a wiki as a guide for the middle school and high school writers. What exactly will be included will be up to the teachers. I will suggest some catagories and provide some examples, but then they will add to the wiki what they feel is helpful.
I value the idea of exploring online resources and then sharing the gems with others much like active bloggers do. I tried to promote this last year with having the students include one "resource link" per week to their professional blogs. While this was effective in getting the students to explore online spaces for writing resources, it wasn't as helpful in terms of sharing the gems. While the few that visited the individual's blog were able to benefit, posting the links on the the wiki, under organized catagories would make the resources more accessable to a wider audience, which taps into the collaborative potential of the wiki.
Some catagories that I'm thinking about so far are...
Researching
Prewriting
Drafting
Revising (genre ... )
Gathering Feedback (peer review ... conferencing ... partner share)
Editing (grammar... conventions ... mechanics)
Publishing
Assessment
Writer Identity (gender... race ... class in writing)
Testing -- The 5 Paragraph essay
This is just a start. I hope to add more ideas and examples of such collaborative wikis as I come accross them.
Comments
My friend who teaches AP Comp and I were just talking about how we need such a resource that covers the recommended concepts and vocabulary for that particular test. She worried that her students wouldn't rise to the challenge of defining and modeling tools correctly. That was my experience teaching that class because those concepts were so foreign to them. Usage was almost always awkward.
Posted by: Jen | October 30, 2007 4:46 PM