WIKIS, GROUP PROJECTS, AND COOPERATIVE LEARNING

WIKIS, GROUP PROJECTS, AND COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Teamwork is essential for success in the workplace. Requiring students, therefore, to work in groups on course-related projects not only helps students learn the subject matter, but also helps them practice the language and social skills needed to complete a project task successfully. Group work, which asks students to produce a jointly created document or artifact, is the venue for cooperative learning. As Kaufman, Felder, and Fuller explain, “Cooperative learning (CL) is an instructional paradigm in which teams of students work on structured tasks” (1). Johnson, Johnson and Holubec have outlined five essential components, which make group work cooperative: a) positive interdependence, b) face-to-face interaction, c) individual and group accountability, d) interpersonal and small group skills, and e) group processing. Numerous empirical studies have shown that cooperation leads to higher achievement and greater productivity, more positive relationships, and stronger psychological health (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith).

Knowing, then, that students benefit academically from working collaboratively on projects, how can instructors facilitate group work? The purpose of this paper is to show how an online tool, namely wikis, can foster equitable interaction and collaboration among team members to produce a coherent group project. Our paper will describe the process of integrating wikis into an existing content-based ESL course, which among various other assignments requires students in groups to complete a comprehensive multi-task project on Thomas Jefferson. This paper is a reflective account of classroom practices based on informal observation.

WHAT IS A WIKI?

A wiki is an online space that allows multiple users to create and edit a single, shared document from any place and at any time. In 2001, wikis grew popular with the creation of Wikipedia, a web-based encyclopedia that was created with the intention of being open to anyone to edit and add entries. According to Phillipson, “wikis drive collaboration, the promote community, they spur interactivity, they spawn archives” (19). The term wiki is Hawaiian for quick, reflecting clearly the purpose of a wiki to rapidly create content.

Although wikis and blogs both facilitate group collaboration, wikis are different from blogs in a number of ways. Wikis incorporate many authors’ work on a single document or group of documents, whereas blogs typically consist of a collection of posts that are usually displayed in chronological order, much like diary entries are recorded day after day. Each blog post is usually one person’s opinion or voice on a single topic. One person, in other words, creates a blog, while many people create a wiki document. A text developed by means of a wiki grows quickly and continuously because contributors are constantly changing, updating, and adding content to the text. A blog beyond the initial text develops more slowly by people posting one by one their comments, often monitored by an individual blogger.

WHAT IS THE JEFFERSON PROJECT?

The Jefferson Project—developed by Lew Levine, director of the Hostos Intensive ESL Program, for ESL 084/088—is a major assignment within a much larger unit on personal, political, and civic freedom. Because the project requires students to complete various tasks, one student alone cannot easily complete the project by him- or herself. Students in groups of three or four do the following five tasks over a two-week period: a) students rewrite The Declaration of Independence in their own words and in a way that a 12-year old child can understand the concepts in the text, b) students write a biography of Thomas Jefferson by answering questions based on a movie they watch of Jefferson’s life, c) students summarize and compare two critical essays written by two well-regarded historians on Jefferson, d) students summarize and compare two critical essays on the founding fathers written by two other leading historians, and e) students summarize and react to an essay by a fifth scholar, Pauline Maier. The final paper for the project must also include an introduction and conclusion.

As one can readily appreciate, The Jefferson Project is quite complex and time- consuming. It requires that students meet often and for extended periods of time to carry it out. Time and convenience, as we all know, are at a premium for students who come from the tri-state area to attend classes at Hostos. In addition, many students have jobs and family commitments, thus, limiting their availability for getting together to work on course projects. In a broader perspective, these are common factors at any educational institution in large metropolitan areas. In an effort, therefore, to reduce the constraints of group work, wikis were created to provide students with an online space, which they could access at any time and from any place to work on their projects outside of class time.

HOW WERE WIKIS PRESENTED TO THE CLASS?

A wiki is just one of many collaborative online tools available for instruction through Blackboard, a web-based course management system. However, before presenting wikis to the class, Blackboard first needed to be introduced. Anecdotally, most of the ESL students taking the Blackboard workshop provided by the Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) said that they did not know what Blackboard was or how Blackboard supplemented a face-to-face course. Blackboard is an online support system for all courses, not solely for hybrid or asynchronous courses. Since learning about Blackboard, students have frequently accessed it for class texts, assignments, and library resources.

As The Jefferson Project approached, a second workshop was planned with the cooperation of OIT to introduce students specifically to wikis. Students were divided into groups, and each group was given their own wiki site in which to do their project. Instructions and Library research resources relevant to the project were provided in every group wiki as a guide. A third workshop was arranged for the students to have access to OIT consultants and Hostos librarian as they completed their projects. Students were directed to consolidate all work into a single site in preparation for their final project draft.

WHAT ARE SOME USEFUL FEATURES AVAILABLE THROUGH WIKI?

Wikis provide three useful features—Editing, Comments Box, and History— for instructors to give input on student work and monitor participation on projects. Like students, instructors can access student work at any time and place through the Internet to provide feedback on content and language. Because the Editing feature on wikis is similar to Revising features found on word-processing programs, instructors can add, subtract, and highlight content and grammatical items for students to revise and edit in their work. Group members can then work on making the changes collaboratively; that is, each person can fix what he or she is capable of fixing. A great advantage is that all changes to the text are saved in case team members or the instructor need to consult texts previously revised and edited.

Comments can be written to the groups in the Comments Box at the end of each text, much like comments instructors include at the end of student papers to direct students’ attention to areas or items that need further work as well as praise students on work well done. Words of support come not only from the instructor, but also from team members and classmates, who can encourage their classmates throughout the project process by also writing comments in the Comments Box. On Blackboard, instructors have the flexibility to set the permission settings on the wikis they create. Instructors, in other words, establish beforehand exactly who can read, add comments, and/or edit the texts. In our case, each student in the class could see the wikis that the other groups created; and, because these wikis were viewable by every student, each group’s work acted as a model for the project tasks. Groups that were struggling were able to consult their classmates’ wikis to better understand the assignment, the con- tent, and the language to be used in doing the project. For instance, students seeing other groups include pictures in their projects also included pictures and visual aids to enhance their work.

The History feature provides valuable information for not only tracking group progress, but also identifying which students are and are not contributing to the project. Discrete friendly reminders to those students who are not contributing as well as to those who are taking over the project help make group participation more equitable and satisfying for the students. The History feature, moreover, saves all revisions made to texts, so nothing is lost when changes are made to the text. In short, one of the capabilities in the learning environment is the continual assessment of student work; and, although wikis were not created with that setting or function in mind, wikis in- corporate assessment of student progress as well as team performance. Wikis, following a cooperative approach, allow for all participants, instructor and students alike, to examine at any point how group work is moving forward toward completion.

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER WAYS TO EXTEND WIKIS?

In answer to students having said that wikis were effective for doing the project itself, but not for presenting it, Power Point presentations and Podcasts have been considered as alternative ways for students to present their work. Recent presentations of The Jefferson Project were podcast and made available online (on the class Backboard site). Students are able to see their project texts and hear their voices (i.e., a sort of voice-over) explaining the various elements of the project that they created. So, the final product/artifact to be viewed online is text that they wrote and revised, images that they selected to accompany the texts, and a voice-over presentation of their work.

The pedagogical point for recording presentations is to allow students to listen not only to the content delivered, but also to their oral delivery. The goal here is to incorporate software that will allow students to edit their oral presentations. This student-directed, editing feature helps students identify areas of their oral production to modify, which might extend to their written work. Audacity is a free downloadable audio-editor software that allows students to edit their pronunciation and revise their intonation, so that they can hear differences between texts. This technology acts as an explicit monitoring device that could possibly become an automatic and internalized skill in students’ oral and written production.

To conclude this paper on how wikis can facilitate group projects, Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (1998), as stated earlier, propose that cooperative learning is predicated on satisfying five criteria. To that end, using wikis encourages positive interdependence among group members while holding individual group members accountable for contributing to the text. Although online interaction is not literally face-to-face, it still involves authentic communication between participants. Wikis make use of collaborative skills and promote continual assessment of team functioning. While the conclusions drawn here are impressionistic, and merit empirical research, some positive outcomes when using wikis to work on group projects have been increased involvement and more equitable participation; and, this in turn has led to higher student satisfaction with the learning experience, resulting in improved collective and individual self- esteem. Working cooperatively on group projects using wikis, a collaborative online environment, develops skills that will help students succeed not only academically, but also professionally.

Paula Korsko

Language and Cognition

Kate Lyons
Library

Carlos Guevara
Instructional Technology

Iber Poma
Instructional Technology

WORKS CITED

Johnson, David W., Roger T. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec. Cooperation in the Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company, 1993.

Johnson, David W., Roger Johnson, and Karl A. Smith. Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company, 1991.

Kaufman, Deborah B., Richard M. Felder, and Hugh Fuller. “Accounting for indi- vidual effort in cooperative learning teams.” Journal of Engineering Education 89 (2000): 133-140.

Phillipson, Mark. “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy.” Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Ed. Robert E. Cummings & Matt Barton. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008. 19-43.