EduBlog Insights

is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about

wikis. It’s about Mr. Phillipson, a visiting asistant professor of English at Bowdoin

College. His public wiki is called the Romantic Audience Project.He sets up his course and uses it to encourage his students to

really get into some lively discussions of poetry.The professors say

that the wikis promote a more casual, flexible form of class discussion

than blogs and message boards. The article goes on to say that some

campus wiki enthusiasts are making the case that the technology can

actually change students’ writing for the better, by encouraging them

to swap ideas with their classmates and to continually revise their

work, instead of turning in a paper and forgetting it forever

The article gives a good overview of wikis for those wanting to learn

more. It was really interesting to see the  way he approached

this. To keep things organized Mr. Phillipson made a few exceptions to

some common wiki conventions. Students could not delete their peers’

work and had to post under user names, not anonymousley. It talks about

the ups and downs. It looks like the students came up with unique ways

of analyzing works.

editors and publishers in shaping the work of John Clare, a

19th-century poet. Another created a short animated film about William

The article reported that the class developed a genuine sense of

community and not only changed the way students think, but it also

changed the way they write.

Mr. Morgan of Bemidji State argues that writers who undersand the

technology can use wikis to look at their craft in a new way. He say

they are more likely to use a process he calls “refactoring”:

material constantly instead of doing so at set points during the

I love article like this that give all the details about how learning

occured, what happened, how a tool is tweaked, and just the discussions around these new types of literacy.

Oh boy, what was even more interesting was checking out the online

discussion about the pros and cons of teaching with wikis. Now that will be worth another post at another time, but this post is long enough.

I haven’t used wikis yet.. Can anyone point me to some good wiki sites where students

are involved? Or sites where the process is explained - what worked, what didn’t is more what I’d like to read. I know about Bud’s good site but would appreciate pointers to any others.