Pros and Cons of Using a Wiki

Caveat: the following are thoughts from just one teacher, after a fairly successful use of this Wiki in the classroom. I'm sure my students would have several items to add here. But they've escaped....

Benefits for the teacher

Easy-to-use technology. After some training broken into four lessons, students were comfortable posting. No major tech glitches during the semester.

Kept student writing specific, focused, engaged with other students. (sample specificity, sample citation of other entries, sample dialogue)

Full and easily accessible archive of work in the class. (index)

Easy to track student activity (example).

Technology seemed to induce extra writing, posting, engagement from students (example).

Multimedia integrated into teaching, collected into one spot (examples: scanned images, content-related photos, student-madegraphics and drawings, student-made movies).

Gave the class a strong identity, in & out of the classroom.

Challenges for the teacher

Keeping up - A 'recent changes' list helped (you can see one on the bottom of the RAP demo). But even with only eight students posting, I wasn't sure I saw all fresh material as it came in. For the weekly posting assignment, I asked them to email me the URL of their three required entries.

Organization - Without some forethought, entries could be scattered to the winds. Author pages (on the right) brought some structure to this site. So did assignment indexes (also on the right).

Posting texts - A lot of gruntwork here, as i had to enter every poem text we studied into the system, correctly formatted.

Housekeeping - To ward off disaster, only the instructor was able to delete posts. Cleaning up student mistakes was a minor, but steady chore.

Fingernail biting - Though no disasters occurred, using new, free, untested software courted them. The whole site could crash, an intruder could screw up pages, content could get accidentally erased.... Luckily I had some guardian angels.

Benefits for students

Fostered and rewarded class interaction. "I especially liked the electronic aspect of the class & the interactive dimension it added."

Group identify and focus. "Whole class could focus on poem and comments together." "Gave a sense of ownership."

Created entity for class: usernames.

Allowed more frequent, shorter expression of ideas.

Allowed quieter students to have a fuller presence in class.

Rewarded skills usually untapped English class (graphical, technological); encouraged creativity.

"Fun."

Challenges for students

Required comfort with computers.

Posting pressure. "The class required constant attention and work."

Posting timing. "Weekly snips were useful, but… difficult to start early because there was little already written to comment on."

Work can be seen by anyone in the world with an internet connection. (See Google searches pointing to RAP)

Instructor's comments (example) also posted.

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