Blog 13

For the first time this semester I was really bothered by the reading. The article, "Working with Wikis in Writing-Intensive Classes", by Cleary et al failed to convince me that wikis work to improve writing in the classroom. Even though at the end of the article they acknowledged that projects like this do not work excellently the first time around, I have a feeling that even if a teacher fine tunes this tool and embeds it into the curriculum it will not work to develop writing skills for students. I understand that collaboration, peer work and revision are essential components in writing classrooms, but this article in particular did not really show me how the group work that was conducted for this study helped to improve content and quality of individual student work. I will admit that I am a bit biased when it comes to "group papers", because having had experience as a student with a project such as this, for the most part there is always an unequal distribution of work within group members. There is always one or two members that produce more work and participation than the rest. On the other hand quality including every member's ideas for something such as refining the thesis of a group paper can lead to a lack focus. In the article Cleary described a similar problem, "Both groups were inclined to sacrifice focus to achieve consensus by including everyone's ideas." It is always nearly impossible for all group members to agree on the thesis, objectives, sources and even organization of a group paper.

The article did demonstrate beneficial aspects of wikis such as, "wikis open up the artificiality of static drafts by fostering and making visible the "dynamic" and "messy" nature of writing." The article also demonstrated how wikis allow for writing classes to be ongoing projects where students can return to previous postings, peer feedback and even their own ideas. But even with all of the evidence provided I believe that what troubled me about this particular article was that even though the authors admitted to their own faults and areas of weakness in the study, they themselves seemed unconvinced of the point they were trying to prove. "While we cannot directly link the wikis to improvement in student writing and while some students did not embrace the possibilities arising from the unstructured nature of the wiki environment, we found wikis very successful in creating collaborative writing opportunities that helped students connect with each other. We assigned collaborative writing assignments in all of our classes." So the students were more social with one another. Wonderful. And they even sat with their own group and shared snacks. Cool. Call me cynical, but I thought that after reading this I would be able to see how wikis would help me help my students with more than just being cordial with each other.