markwk minding the borderlands

Working Together: Wiki, ESL Writing Project Update

Technology cannot replace a good teacher nor cannot it automatically make group’s work together, especially in a cultural context where students have little experience working together. As I reported earlier [1], I am currently experimenting with Wiki technology in some ESL writing classes of mine in China (See WikiWriteRight). As the initial weeks end and we attempt to move towards competition, it is appropriate to look at what is going well, what isn’t and how can it improve.  While the results haven’t been all negative so far, the one factor I underestimated was how little experience and understanding Chinese students have with working in a group.

American students spend a significant amount of their education working together. There are times when it works better than others, but overall we all understand the needs and general how-to when comes to working with a group.  In my current experience, this is not at all true for Chinese students. When I informally questioned my classes about experiences working together in groups, they said they had had no experience working with others.

My misperception of the cultural context and general assumption of people knowing how to work together meant over two weeks after this project had started many groups had yet to do any sort of work together. Some groups had indeed started creating a story, but once I looked at the history page, it became clear that simply one student had done all of the work. Up to this point, only a few groups had really embraced the idea of working together towards better ideas and better writing.

I subsequently spent this week’s class focusing on group’s getting better organized. I did several activities for groups to self-report on things they need to work on in their story and parts of their writings that need more explanation or more details. In turn, I had them self-assign homework for each other.

I am not sure how well this will turn out, but in the back of my mind, this was a mistake I made at the beginning of the project. Namely, more time needed to be spent at the beginning to establish who should do what. Looking back, I think each week should entail some sort of tally sheet to keep track of who does what. Each weekly class should end with a list of small assignments for various members of the group. Without some form of organization, I think groups tend to remain rather stagnant.

The other idea that I think would improve this kind of collective writing project using wiki technology would be to choose topics that instill more unified visions of what is to be done. For this project, I decided to do a pure story writing activity. I did not set any particular limits nor require any kind of parameters. After looking at a very short story, I gave students some time to brainstorm various aspects of stories and to list possible ideas for their stories, including characters, settings, and conflict scenarios. Even though some groups did find a thread to follow, some have yet to really start and are still searching for what to do. Pure creative writing is good but perhaps too open for disagreement and varying visions in groups, especially given that I didn’t set any parameters and I required them to work in groups of my choosing not their choosing.

One way to improve this would have been to choose a nonfiction topic where students could work together without such trouble brainstorming what should be done at the beginning. The problem with nonfiction writing is that it significantly opens the door to cheating, since depending on the topic assigned, there is the possibility that the answer (or at least an answer) is already out there on the Internet.  Research-based projects on historical, political and social topics would seem to easily lead to plagiarism.

One idea that came to me this week was to do a nonfiction writing project that focuses on writing about the life and thoughts of Chinese university students. The idea would be to imagine creating a time capsule for future generations. As a pre-writing activity, you could imagine what things you would want to include in it and why. In turn, you would say that one thing that needed to be included in the time capsule is an account of life as a Chinese student today. You could then brainstorm about what aspects of Chinese student life that would need to be included in this written account. After brainstorming a list of topics for this account, groups would be assigned to start writing the various sections.  There are various reasons why this project would be easier to manage and finish than our current project. Namely, (1.) the writing process would be more goal focused; (2.) each group would have a more focused project that is also a part of a whole; (3.) individual members would more easily be able to add details and revisions without worrying so much about tarnishing someone else’s contribution.

I am not sure I will in the future attempt a similar project like this, but if I do I think I would seriously consider simplifying the user interface (perhaps using some adaption of Drupal or Moodle over MediaWiki) as well as choosing a more goal focused writing topic where less time would be spent on pre-writing questions about what to write as opposed to drafting and writing process of details and revisions to add.

These are just some thoughts. Have a look at the current site, and if you have any thoughts or questions, post them in the comments section or directly on the Wiki.

[1]: http://www.markwk.com/2010/10/setting-up-mediawiki-for-an-esl-collaborative-writing-project.html

Setting Up MediaWiki for an ESL Collaborative Writing Project

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I've been thinking about how to use technology in my classroom teaching. Over the last couple days, I setup my first wiki project: WikiWriteRight. It's a wiki for my students to be able to draft and revise their stories collectively.

I have used PHP-based web application for about a year now. I understand the basics of setting up my own CMS (Content Management System) as well as using systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. This current blog is run on WordPress, which is a very easy and adaptable system for blogs. As a blogging and content management system, these all have their place, but they are not wiki, though they are adaptable for some wiki-like functions.

A wiki, if you didn't already know, is web page that can be edited and created by anyone. The biggest and most famous example of this technology in action is Wikipedia, which currently boasts, as of August 2010, 3,400,000 articles in English alone. Excluding a few paid positions, which go with any large project, Wikipedia has been amazingly almost entirely created, edited and managed by volunteers. Since reading The Wikipedia Revolution a couple months ago, I came to understand the power and potential of this kind of technology adapted to a collective goal managed and run through individual actions. It is almost unbelievable that this project succeeded as it has. Since then, I have been wondering how I might put wiki technology to use in my life and in my projects.

The Situation: Getting Students to Write and Edit Together

I currently teach English Writing to Chinese Business students at a well-known university in Chengdu. Like most young people, my students are keen on technology, and, unlike my previous teaching at a different university, these students are quite motivated to study and learn. The students are interested in practicing their English, and they do, indeed, enjoy giving me their homework to look over. But there is one major problem: they don't like revising and editing their homework. In fact, I think they hardly even re-read their homework before turning it in.

While I have no difficulty correctly their errors, it pains me to see those errors repeated. The cycle tends to go like this: 1.) They do their homework and give it to me. 2.) I correct and return their homework to them. 3.) They look at what I wrote and corrected. Unfortunately, what happens next is the hard part. When I assign them a new exercise they tend to repeat the same mistakes: they don't check that verb tenses match; they misuse the same terminology; etc. En bref, they don't learn from their mistakes. One of the reasons they don't learn from their mistakes is the failure to re-read and revise their homework.

Revision is a key component in writing and learning to write. Ideally, I would have students work together to revise each other's homework, but in a Chinese context, this is a somewhat culturally delicate affair since friends don't want to seem critical or disapproving of their friends. It's a delicate balance.

To summarize the situation: My students need a way to write and revise together, and as their teacher, I need a way to provide corrections and track their changes and corrections over time.

The Solution: "WikiWriteRight," a wiki for collaborative writing and editing for ESL students.

In order to meet this situation, I decided to try my hand at using Wiki technology and created WikiWriteRight. I tried a couple wiki systems before settling on MediaWiki, which is the open source software that runs Wikipedia. MediaWiki has been perfected and worked on by a large group of people, and it has successful run on of the largest internet projects in history. Unlike other PHP-based CMSs, MediaWiki isn't trying to satisfying everything and, in the end, do nothing particularly well. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful wiki platform. It keeps track of changes and additions to pages. It provides a discussion page for debates between writers and editors about what to change. And it is relatively intuitive to use. There are some strange editing features like creating headlines and links, but more or less, it is a "what you see is what you get" system.

To test and setup MediaWiki for this project, WikiWriteRight, I setup a MySQL database and installed MediaWiki locally on my computer. I setup of three user accounts: a systems administrator or, in Wiki-talk, a "bureaucrat" account (WikiSyops) with all privileges, a simple administrator account (TeacherMark) and a simple user account (SampleStudent). I then began write and setting up textual elements of my wiki.

One of the first difficulties I ran into was understanding how to write and format my text in the editor so it would look and act like I wanted. While it should be clear from the above that I consider MediaWiki to be a very capable and robust system for creating and managing wikis, it's editing system is a little bit confusing initially. Once you get an idea how it works, it is extremely simple and not particularly difficult to use or understand.

One of my worries when I begin implementing this system with my students in the coming weeks is their ability to understand the somewhat confusing editing of a wiki page. Hopefully, if during the first classes I am able to successfully explain what is a wiki and how to use one, then the rest of the project should be fine. In order to ease the use and implementation of this project, I have written numerous instructional pages (as well as links to Chinese versions on other sites) and created a sample project for them to use as a reference to know what they should do. I hypothesize that most of my students will have little difficult getting used to this system and might even take some pleasure in the technical side of it all.

I think one of the more powerful features of wikis is the history page. When we use and read entries on wikipedia, we are almost never aware of the process that went into building these pages, but once you open up the history page, it becomes clear all the hands, eyes and brains that went into a single entry. As a teacher, I think the history page will hopefully provide me and my students a better way to track and follow their progress in this collaborative writing process.

Along with the core setup and initial pages, from a technical perspective, I also added a couple changes and extensions to my wiki in order to improve the use for my students:

1. I created a logo and added it the basic layout.
2. I activated the upload function.
3. I added a more organized forum-like extension to the discussion page to make it easier to use and more understandable.
4. I added the Google Analytics code in order to track and follow user stats.
5. I added a voting system, which will allow my students to vote on which stories they think are the best.

Initial Conclusions: Using Wiki Technology in an ESL Context for Collaborative Writing

For someone who is reasonably computer savvy, setting up a wiki using MediaWiki is pretty easy. There are a few quirks to improving the use of a wiki including adding some useful extensions, but I think overall it is fairly intuitive and well-built system.

From my personal perspective as a teacher and web designer and developer, I think this technology has a lot of strengths for a teaching environment. A teacher can setup the basic pages by themselves and, after some initial explanations, students should be able to self-manage their projects. Once the project has started, a teacher can easily follow the progress of their students work by reviewing the history pages, and a teacher can either suggest directly make changes on the page itself or suggest changes on talk/discussion page. From a pedagogical perspective, I think the system encourages participation and will hopefully solve some of the difficulties in getting students to revise and perfect their work.

The major problem and difficulty I have this using MediaWiki in a teaching context is that it slightly too complicated for a teaching environment. I suppose if I had more time or were to do this project again, I could revise the template pages to remove certain information and links and to change the complexity of the layout. The main difficulty I think is that the page presents too much information and too many choices without directing students to which activities that should do and use. One change I am considering adding would be adding a way to associate students with certain pages. Once they are attached to a certain page or project, a sidebar box could be built that indicates activities that they can and should do.

Overall, I look forward to putting this project into action, and I will provide updates soon on how it goes. I'm interested to hear your ideas and comments.