"Teaching Technical Communication with Wikis"

Contents

Introduction

Pedagogical Benefits

Practical Benefits

Considerations for Instructors

Works Cited

Practical Benefits

I first considered teaching a wiki assignment in my own course because of the prevalence of online writing.  Initially, I had wanted to have students build their own website using Dreamweaver, but I knew from my own coursework that if I instructed students to deliver an informational website, they would spend far more time just getting the site to work than they would writing content.  Furthermore, it was almost a guarantee that the most tech-savvy person in the group would end up doing all the website work, while the others sat on standby.  Wikis provided an opportunity for students to publish online and avoid the complications of building a website from scratch, while still taking into consideration those features that separated good websites from bad websites, such as navigation tools and consistent formatting of content.

Another benefit of wiki use is the logistical assistance it offers collaborative groups.  The draft posted on the wiki is always the current draft, therefore avoiding the confusion that often results when groups exchange multiple drafts via email.  If information is accidentally deleted or lost, it can be retrieved through the use of the Page History function.  Finally, because all planning documents and to-do lists can be posted on the wiki, groups may not have to meet face-to-face as frequently (or at all).

Wikis also provide some reassurance to students who resist collaborative projects.  Almost every student has had at least one negative experience working with a group; most of the time, that experience involved one or more members who didn’t do the portion of the project assigned to them.  Students who are resistant to collaboration for this reason may be reassured that if one member of a group is not contributing to the project, the page history will make that problem apparent; if instructors make allowances for individual grades in collaborative projects, this information may be important for evaluation.

Introducing students to wikis has practical benefits outside the classroom as well.  Wikis are becoming an increasingly popular venue for information management, as evidenced by Wikipedia[HM3] , the Ubuntu Team Wiki, and Sourceforge’s wiki for its FreeMind idea mapping software.  Once students are aware of the capabilities of wikis, they may be able to find ways to use the technology to manage future school or workplace projects.

Suggested Wiki-Based Assignments

Classrooms present multiple opportunities for using wiki technology, and instructors may use the technology in whatever manner is most comfortable to them, from small- to large-scale assignments.

As an example of a smaller-scale assignment, Kitalong-Will focuses on audience analysis in an assignment where students collaboratively select and revise an article from Wikipedia (190-192).  Collier creates a wiki site for the whole class, then asks students to collaboratively write articles on a scientific or technological controversy, with each article as a page in the wiki site; he then asks them to respond to another group’s article, expanding the number of collaborators who contribute to these works.

Wikis may also be used to facilitate larger, longer-term course projects. For example, Carr, Morrison, Cox, and Deacon report on a project in which students used wikis for “individually composed essays and collaboratively written introductions and conclusions by student teams” (271).  The instructor “saw wikis as collaborative spaces that would allow for more effective educator intervention into the writing process.  She was able to access the wikis in the evening and identify ‘argument flaws.’ Her approach then was to suggest where students could improve their writing or to ‘get into an intellectual discussion’” (Carr et al. 274).  Although this particular assignment structure leaves individual pages in the wiki site unedited by collaborators (since each student writes his or her own essay), it does allow for a collaborative effort in writing the introduction and conclusion.

The wiki project I assign in my technical writing courses are constructed as a research-driven collaborative writing project worth a significant portion of the course grade.  In this project, students are instructed to create a wiki site that explored a particular problem related to their field of study and either take one stance on the issue or present multiple perspectives in a sort of pro/con arrangement.  They begin by presenting topics to their classmates in a five-minute oral presentation as well as a written proposal posted to the class discussion board.  The following week, they form their own groups based on the topics presented, and each group writes a brief project plan, creates a wiki site, and collaborates on what what is usually the rough equivalent of a ten- to fifteen-page research paper.

Because the actual definition of what students were supposed to write about in this project was purposely open-ended—they were instructed to work collaboratively with classmates to create a wiki site that informs and persuades a specific audience about a problem in or related to their field of study—students had to work with a rather poorly-defined project.  This situation required individual groups to focus their topics without much guidance.  Most groups were able to accomplish this task, while others either sought out my advice in narrowing down a topic or were asked to describe the relevance of some content when I gave feedback on drafts.  I also gave no guidelines in terms of a word count or number of pages I would require from the final wikis; I required instead that their site provide “comprehensive” coverage of the topic.

My poor project definition was purely intentional; my goal was to follow Wilson’s recommendations and place students in a situation where they had to become comfortable with an ill-defined task in preparation for “real-world” situations, and I feel the project accomplished that objective.  These guidelines also served to incorporate the fluidity of websites as a genre.  The majority of the class wikis provided excellent coverage of their topics and was structured in logical, effective ways.