Advice on starting a wiki for your class…

One thing about winning an EduBlog Award is that lots of teachers begin visiting your site, and if they like what they see, they may contact you for advice. This has happened a few times since my class wiki, Welker’s Wikinomics, won the 2007 EduBlog award for Best Wiki.

Below is an email I received from a teacher in the states who’s interested in getting into the “Wiki World” next year. Following her message is my reply, which I thought I’d share here since it gives some advice on overcoming some of the obstacles and challenges of making effective use of a wiki in educaion.

Dear Mr. Welker,

Upon the advice of Mr. James Lerch, I took a few minutes to go over the Wiki that you have created to your AP Economics section. I had some questions, if that’s alright, as I am hoping to enter the big-bad world of Wiki myself…

For some background, I am a newly minted AP teacher for the 08-09 school year. I will be teaching 5 AP classes, one of which encompasses APUSH and AP English Language as an interdisciplianry course. For this course, I am hoping to implement a project in which students write their own history texts.

This project has come about after being severely disturbed by the lack of any real information in today’s high school American History textbooks. If I had been taught out of something like this, History would not have been my field. I want to do something in which the students can feel involved… Enter the wiki. Not only do I want to teach, and have the students learn, against a textbook… I want them to write about their own interpretations. This exercise is meant to not only strengthen their analytical abilities, it is also meant to allow them to fulfill multiple credits in a truly interdisciplianry environment.

I would welcome, and in truth beg for, your input concerning this idea. It would be great if you could tell me how your own exerpience with “wikinomics” has both enhanced your classroom and what challenges you’ve faced. If you have any paarticular advice about my project, that is also MORE than welcome.

Thank you in advance for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Johnna

Here’s my reply to Johnna:

Hello Johnna,

Thanks for your interest in using wikis in your class! I’d be happy to offer you some advice and ideas.

I think your idea of having the students create a wiki textbook for APUSH and AP Lang is a great one. Since there is probably not a perfect text out there integrating these two diverse topics, it seems logical to have the kids create one of their own, and the wiki is the perfect medium for such a collaborative project!

The key to any wiki’s success, I believe, is strategic planning and effective organization by the teacher. My biggest obstacle in the first few months of using the wiki was organization. At first I just started adding pages that I wanted the kids t contribute to, but the more pages I added the more chaotic the wiki became.

It took me a while to figure out how to effectively organize it so that students could navigate their way through the wikis broad array of content as easily as they could flip to a chapter in a text book. In other words, I needed a “table of contents” so to speak. I also needed to organize the pages of the wiki into categories, starting with “semester 1″ and “semester 2″, then break it down into “unit 1, 2, 3″ and so on. Then within each unit I had to break it down into concepts, and within each concept specific topics. That way, the wiki is very pyramid-like in its organization, with one homepage that links to the two semesters, whose main pages link to individual units, which then link to pages for each broad concept, finally with links to the individual topic pages, to which students themselves add content.

Figuring out how to effectively organize the wiki was the biggest challenge. Then comes the question, “what will students do on the wiki”? This you’ll need to discover on your own, I’m afraid. This is also the really fun and challenging part of using a wiki. For example, do you want them simply copying notes from class onto the wiki, or creating new, original content collaboratively? I have attempted to do both with Welker’s Wikinomics.

The topic pages I mentioned above are basically places for the kids to post their notes communally, for me to post images and graphs I’ve used and created for class and for them to create a collaborative study guide for the AP exams. The students are not really “creating” anything original. That is what some of the other features are for, such as the “discussion forums” and the “AP Econ in the News” pages, where the students discuss and analyze news and ideas relating to what we’re learning, but beyond the basic theory from lectures and their textbooks.

Also, I have found blogs to be extremely effective as a medium for students to express original thoughts. Consider integrating a class-written blog with your wiki as well, or even individual student blogs, or maybe a separate blog for each of your five AP classes. The blog is a great medium for kids to offer individual, critical analysis of topics from your classes and receive feedback from their peers, their teacher, and even others who find the blog from beyond the school community (the SAS Economists blog I created for students to write on has had over 8,000 visitors from all over the world!).

Hopefully the ideas above will help you get started on your own Wiki adventures! I have created a wiki presentation which goes over these and other ways to use a wiki in education, this presentation can be found at http://learning2shanghai.wetpaint.com.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Best, Jason

Tags: advice, Web 2.0, Welker's Wikinomics, Wetpaint, wikis