wikipedia in the classroom
October 30th, 2005A recent assignment for technical writing used collaborative writing. The plan was to get in groups of 3-4 and write an essay analysing various forms of visual literacy. As soon as I heard the word collaboration in my writing class, I went to wikipedia. Sure enough, the visual literacy page was a stub.
It took a little bit of convincing, but once the other guys had a chance to play with it, they seemed to like the idea. We could all work on the document, track who did what, and publish our material (this is what intimidated one member the most). As an extra bonus, we did not have to email around a word document.
It worked! Still pretty rough, and not done, but… I present you…. the wikipedia page on Visual literacy.
October 31st, 2005 at 1:16 am
Nice work. I llike the page, and I like the approach because I think the web page has long been the original ‘open document format’. In short — WORD!
October 31st, 2005 at 4:39 am
Nice one! Have you seen [[Wikipedia:School and University projects]]? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_University_projects
You should also make something nice for User:Polvi’s user page :-)
November 2nd, 2005 at 6:30 am
Nice work. I have left you guys some comments on the article talk page. I hope this will not be your last project on Wiki :)
December 5th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
a little late but…
irwin and I (both OSULUGers, now) have used SubEthaEdit for the Mac that lets you do live-file editing over a network. Track in realtime and watch the file change per keystroke from all your collaberators. It made writing software together much easier “Hey, look here, see, THIS should have been THAT” and I could watch his changes live on my screen.
It is the same idea as wikipedia, but with a focus on being a live revision editing system, less overhead then wikipedia as it is basically just ‘ok, start typing your essay’ and watch how changes are made.
Collaborative writing is now a joke without a cat5 and a qwerty keyboard. It really made the process come alive, and I hope it schools catch on to similar practices.