At tomorrow’s Blogging Brown Bag discussion organized by Kent State University’s Office of Digital Composition, we’re going to discuss Rebecca Wilson Lundin’s “Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy” from Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 432-448. I thought I would post some of my thoughts here before our meeting in the Satterfield Reading Room tomorrow.
Lundin’s article is a great introduction to educators about the potential and promise of using wikis in the composition classroom. In fact, I was jazzed about one day using a wiki in my own classes in the future after reading her essay. I may be somewhat biased in my eagerness to use wikis in the classroom, because I am a contributor to Wikipedia, and I know how to install MediaWiki on a Mac OS X box. However, I think that Lundin makes some persuasive points about the power of wikis in the composition classroom, so let me go into some of those in more detail.
She begins by talking about a networked pedagogy (I’m thinking Foucault’s biopolitics) comprised of ”writing as a networked activity,” and “teaching as a networked activity” (432). These ideas of shared, distributed, and interconnected means of learning and teaching should be facilitated by technologies that reinforce those network oriented goals, such as wikis.
Wikis are excellent examples of a collaborative writing and composing technology that obviously engages network culture, come close to embodying the original vision of hypertext, and the unique features of wikis including editability and page histories reinforce compositional goals of revision and collaboration.
Lundin’s essay emphasizes how wikis challenge assumptions about the traditional composition classroom (i.e., individual authorship, workshopping papers, teacher facilitated discussion, etc.). She demonstrates that wikis challenge these assumptions in four key ways:
1) New media composition in a wiki requires little if any expertise beyond the use of a word processor and the open design of wikis promise to unbound student creativity and expression by embracing multimodality.
2) Collaborative writing made possible by wikis breaks down the single author paradigm by allowing all wiki participants to write, edit, and comment on any wiki pages including those of other students and those created by the teacher. Furthermore, the transparency, as Carr et. al. describe it, of wikis through page histories facilitates reflection on the individual’s writing as well as the group collaborative process.
3) Critical interaction by a real audience of a student’s peers along withfeedback from the teacher should enable a more authentic engagement of students’ work. Instead of writing for the teacher, students will write for one another, and give criticism to one another. I think that this aspect holds a lot of promise, but as Lundin admits this is one of the more difficult aspects to engage students with when she discusses her creation of a “class of lurkers” (441). Additionally, she notes problems with flame wars between students. This part of her essay particularly intreged me, due to my own work on trolls and flame wars in academic discussion lists.
4) Online authority, particularly on wikis, is decentralized and virtually anonymous. Instead of merely subverting authority, Lundin makes a valid argument that instead authority in the traditional teacher-student sense is complicated by wiki work. This could serve to undermine what power the teacher may hold over the classroom dialog and guiding of student work, but the very nature of wikis does empower all users, teacher and student alike, through page histories and what Will Richardson calls soft security, or participant policing of the wiki. Additionally, student anonymity could help some students contribute in writing through the wiki when they are hesitant to contribute verbally in the classroom.
Concluding, she indicates that wikis, through their social and networked interaction, promote student social context awareness, because despite the appearance of anonymity, they are engaging one another as social writers.
I find Lundin’s essay compelling, and I plan on considering ways in which I can implement wikis in future classes. I like how wikis will make writing regularly so much easier, and most wikis will pragmatically make teacher evaluation of writing easier by selecting to view all contributions by a particular writer/student. As Lundin noted, some teachers would be reticent to have a fully open wiki, and I would fall into this category as well for the simple fact that it might be better for all parties concerned not to allow for too much tomfoolery. However, a little tomfoolery might be a good thing, and turn into a teachable moment. I will have to think more on this point as I figure out how to design my class around a wiki/network paradigm. Also, I am concerned about the flame war aspect of online communication for the composition classroom. This will inevitably happen, and my primary concern is potential alienation of some students as a result of one or some students non-reflective acts. Again, this is something that I will have to think further about.
If you are a teacher, I definitely recommend you find this article (details listed above), and read it–my notes do not do it justice!
Posted by Jason Ellis 
