Wikis for Group Work

Here are my thoughts on the effectiveness of using a wiki for the purposes of a group assignment (the unit of work) in Chem this past few weeks...

My main aim was to try it out on some adults, so we could analyze some advantages and disadvantages of the medium. Here is my list, for want of a better way to put it!

Disadvantages (either observed or I consider there's a definite potential for these issues)

• Too easy for a student to say they are confused by the technology and so not contribute properly. A new excuse for an old problem?
• Students may really be too daunted by the technology, and get bogged down with that rather than learning and contributing. Yes, these are two separate issues :-)
• If users don't log in, the changes made are not registered against anyone, which will make assessment difficult for the teacher (who did what?).
• It took too long to find a product and set it up. The free ones can't restrict visibility to select users only (perhaps a privacy issue here).
• Even though structuring of group assignments is always difficult, it was made more so with the wiki b/c it was slow to communicate & we assumed we could (in part) plan the assignment via the wiki. I don't think this part worked too well lol & it took a disproportionate amount of time in planning.
• Nobody likes to delete somebody else's work for fear of offending them, so the communication lines are not as effective when trying to chat largely via technology. I wonder if Gen Y or Gen C will experience this problem in the same way as we did...
• You still need to have plenty of face-to-face contact time, as the wiki doesn't help with planning assignments, it only caters for the actual 'doing' part.

This makes it sound like I'll never go near a wiki again, but actually, overall I thought it has great potential, with a little refinement.

Advantages

• When students log in before editing the wiki, there are named, tracked changes to a single document. As a teacher, I'd like this kind of visibility particularly in group assignments where it's usually very difficult to know the break-up of work.
• As a student in group-work, you can all work on the same document without fear of version control (which inevitably goes pear-shaped).
• As a student, I liked being able to do the work in my own time and know where other people were at with their work. This visibility only really started happening about a week ago, but I liked it once it did. We live in a very 'now' society these days lol!
• I find this personally engaging as a medium, because it is different. Other people probably find the opposite but it shows this might appeal to some students simply for the sake of itself.
• I learned a bit more about wikis as a result of this, and am now thinking about how this technology will be useful in a variety of settings, including student group assignments (I had already listed it as one possible presentation method in the jigsaw assessment Kate!) and exactly this - units of work - for teachers in schools. I'm sure there's more...

Things that could be improved on when using it with students' group work

• Definitely pre-establish a wiki and load a broad structure for students. That part really was a time-pit & ineffective.
• Make up some clear guidelines about wiki etiquette (eg it's ok to delete other people's work in the process of improvement and refinement, as it's all recoverable via roll-back features anyway!).
• Do some simple training on the basics of how to use a wiki, so everyone feels capable of actually using it prior to undertaking assignments.

As we were experimenting & none of us had done anything like this before, these issues couldn't have been foreseen, but I'm glad we tried it out, as I feel I know much more about wikis and their potential now. It's not just a hype word to me anymore (does this mean I'll be less engaged next time, by definition?) :-)

In general, my thoughts on working through the content of the assignment are overall that this was a difficult but very good learning activity. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this was how challenging we found keeping a constant themed context right throughout a single unit of work, and in hindsight I think this reflects our own lack of depth of knowledge about chemistry in the world around us. I am very committed to bringing context into my science classrooms, and am slowly building up a bank of context based activities to use, but this was quite a bit more challenging than that. At first the idea of a thematic context distracted us from the chemistry, but in the end we came back to the ideas behind a CoRe and considered what the important concepts were and what content students needed to know, then found examples to demonstrate with in our chosen context . I still think we could have covered this a bit better, but it was a very beneficial process for us to go through. Apart from learning a bit of chemistry in the world around me, I also encountered the significant workload involved in generating a single unit to teach. In reality, I consider the unit we created still needs further work before it could be used to teach with, although it is a very good start. In addition, we all encountered having to negotiate the most appropriate approach to teaching the unit, which involved each of us having to step back from some of the ideas we individually had to find a common ground. I suspect if this were a real teaching situation, I would be less likely to negotiate on some of my viewpoints, which would make the process even more challenging than it already was. I wonder how my partners felt about it....