“Romantic Poetry Meets 21st-Century Technology”
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.
“One drew and posted a pair of pictures that represented the role of
editors and publishers in shaping the work of John Clare, a
19th-century poet. Another created a short animated film about William
Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
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”:
“posting shards of text, spinning them off into larger pieces, reworking
material constantly instead of doing so at set points during the
writing process.”
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.