The problem Students in Freshman English tend to be resistant to reading critically and resonding constructively to each other's writing. When they offer criticism at all, it tends of be superficial (commas, other minor mechanical problems) or flattering ("I thought it was really good!"). Neither of these types of criticism is likely to be of much use to students working to improve their writing. Students need to be comfortable offering substantive critical response on the level of ideas, argument, and rhetorical strategy, and the current mechanisms (writing workshop groups, entering comments in MS Word documents) are not providing adequate avenues for them to do so.

Methodologies & Types of Evidence of Student Learning Gathered There will be two primary measurement strategies for this project. Student reflection: I will ask students to reflect in narrative form on both their contribution to the written work of their peers and the improvement in their own writing brought about by the critical collaboration process. Evaluation of finished work: I will evaluate the finished product of student work against the standard measures employed in the course (strength of thesis, logic of argument, use of evidence and research, etc.) to determine if there has been improvement as a result of the critical collaboration. Fall 2007 IRB Application IRB application for the project.

Project summary This project aims to adapt one of the most dynamic modes of collaborative writing in existence today--the wiki--for use in the Freshman Honors English classroom. Students will be assigned writing projects to be posted on the wiki; they will likewise be required to edit each other's work, or contribute questions to the "discussion" tab for the page they are editing. Students will then reflect on both their contribution to the "final" text of the wiki pages and the improvement they see in their own text as a result of their colleagues input. My goal is to determine whether the wiki format, a familiar one to students of this generation, wil encourage the kind of critical collaboration that one sees in public projects such as Wikipedia. Wiki assignment Assignment for the Wiki project tied to the SOTL research (PDF).

Annotated List of Helpful Resources & References Literature on use of wikis is developing, and not accessible using standard research tools. Will post here as I find them. WiscWIKI project A wiki that grew out of an OPID-funded workshop in Madison.

Preliminary Findings, Results, Conclusions, & Implications In the Fall of 2007, I performed a preliminary exploration of using wiki software for class projects this semester in the Freshman Honors English course. What I found is that students used the wiki as a bulletin board or as an assisted HTML creation application. They posted static information, and rarely interacted with each other's contribution. This tells me that there will need to be considerable structure and clear expectations on their use of the wiki for critical collaboration. It also demonstrates that the "Wikipedia culture" of freely editing the work of others has not penetrated the writing practices of this group of students. In the Spring of 2008, I launched the full research study with much stronger rules for posting, editing, and interacting with other students' work. See the assignment sheet PDF in the orange box to the left for complete details. Students were required to make a prescribed number of changes to other students' wiki pages each week, as well as to respond to any discussion posts attached to their own page. Because the "results" of the study (three surveys) are embargoed until grades are turned in next week, I don't yet have much insight into how students view their progress in terms of improvement of their critical writing skills. But I can say at this point that the participation in wiki-based activities was uneven, with some students posting and editing regularly and others resisting it even though it was a graded element of the class. Once I can access survey data I will be able to determine whether there are attitudinal correlations that might explain such variations.

Career Relevance & Impact Shiny Things: I have already found that there are many people working on the cutting edge of technology simply because that's where they like to be--not because that's where their students need them to be. I have begun to call this tendency "Shiny Things" pedagogy. It is a slavish devotion to new technology because it's you know, new--not because it helps them teach more effectively. My rule now is that I will listen to someone describe their use of a new technology for 2 minutes, and if I don't hear them say the words "students" or "learning" in that time I stop listening. Ongoing