A wiki is a new form of online publication, kind of like a collaborative web site, built with the contributions of its members. You may have read about this new phenomenon in an earlier article in this series, Authority, that described a recent controversy about the dangers of unmediated sources of information online. This week's article centers on the work of Richard Steeves of Hunter College in New York City, who has found some interesting ways to incorporate a wiki into his teaching.

-- Jim Lengel

Tell us about the wiki phenomenon.

I see it as an interesting environment that allows for collaborative thinking in a community setting. In a wiki, various individuals produce knowledge in a common framework, using basic online and browser tools. It's the production of knowledge that's at the center of it all -- in my course, students contribute to the knowledge we are developing. Rather than reading or hearing the content, they create it themselves.

The largest example of a wiki online is the Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedic resource. One might ask of such a project, "If anyone can contribute, where's the authenticity? What's the responsibility of the individual when they write a contribution?" Wikipedia got in trouble recently (see A false Wikipedia 'biography') because we are just figuring out how to manage this new form of knowledge production. The Wiki is a leading example of how the Web is moving from one-way, point and click commerce sponsored by corporate America, to peer-to-peer, contributory, open source knowledge sharing and production.

Wikis allow people at various levels to create content and publish to others. It portends a democratization of this new communications medium.

Tell us about what you are teaching with a Wiki.

I teach English 306, Literary Theory, an upper-level course for English majors who plan to continue their education in graduate school. It prepares them to think about their discipline in a new way, to become aware of critical traditions in English literature studies, and to learn how to play a role in it. The students represent the diversity of New York City's population, meeting in the evenings, most of them working full-time. They represent a wide range of ages and of familiarity with the subject.

How do you use a Wiki in this course?

I was concerned about the broad range of terms and concepts that this group needs to understand. In previous classes, I simply transmitted this information to them in the classroom -- hardly an effective teaching strategy. By organizing the vocabulary and conceptual information in a Wiki, I put this responsibility for learning directly on the students themselves. They build the Wiki on their own time, as homework, allowing class time to focus on more interesting ideas. The Wiki encourages self-learning, and promotes discussion among students.

To get them started, I create stubs --starter sentences -- and ask them to use a variety of resources to complete the stubs. They have added links, summaries, questions, explanations, quotations and images, and are actively involved in exploring the topic. We are building a Glossary of Literary Terms this semester. I posted ten terms for the 30 students in the course to work on.

For example, with the term defamiliarization (an important concept in critical theory) I simply posted the word on the Wiki. Students found articles, definitions, artistic works, rhetorical approaches, examples from student art at Hunter, and added these to the Wiki. They have also reflected on each others' contributions.

What are the results of Wiki-ing?

The class has opened up, because students feel they are actively contributing to it. The Wiki has provided a continuing structure that links our weekly discussions into an organic flow of ideas. We use more media, and more student-produced works to learn from. The course is more dynamic. Students use examples from the Wiki in their mid-term papers.

How does a teacher set up a Wiki for his class?

1. Find a wiki farm, one that offers free and open accounts. I used Seed Wiki for this course because it allowed us more freedom and control over access and organization. Other places for building Wikis are WikiCities and Schtuff.
2. Create an account.
3. Build a front page, something to prompt the contributions from students. This might be words to define, questions to answer, people to explore, or ideas to explain.
4. Assign your students to build the wiki by responding to your prompts.
5. Review the growing wiki often. Suggest to your students ways to refine it and make more useful.

You'll find it's organic, it takes on a life of its own, and it spreads like kudzu. For example, our glossary got out of control, so it became difficult to find the original terms. I had to reorganize the wiki to display the menu of terms in a separate page.