Just a few years later, Wikipedia burst onto the scene and changed encyclopedias forever. Encyclopedias were no longer expensive volumes or even software, but available to anyone with the internet. More importantly, anyone with internet access could add their OWN additions to the encyclopedia. In the decade since Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous, there are numerous off-shoots: Ballotpedia, an almanac of US politics; Wikibooks, a free textbook collection; and my personal favorite, Wookieepedia, a Star Wars encyclopedia.
Although Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known wiki, wikis were developed over 10 years earlier by Ward Cunningham who had the idea to collaboratively build things on the internet (1). With just a computer and internet access, any group of people could collaborate on a wiki.
Anyone who's ever had to have something published or peer-reviewed knows what a languishing process publication can be. A wiki is instant. The openness with which wiki pages can be edited is also what contributes to its success. Everyone and anyone can see the editing process and make corrections or call out the original contributor as needed. To me, a wiki is the best part of the internet: open information and collaboration.
Affordances
The site I'm choosing to discuss today, PBworks, has been around since the early 2000s and is used by many business and educational groups (2). The earliest versions of wikis required knowledge of markup language, but thankfully the process has become much more simplified. If you can edit a Google Doc, you can edit a wiki.
I grew up with Windows 3.1 and the original Napster, so the homepage of PBworks looks familiar to me. I don't think it's as aesthetically pleasing as some other websites, and I could see my students perhaps pausing, but it is logically laid out. If you just read left to right, you can see the labels: Wiki, Pages, Users, and Settings.
On the Frontpage are a VIEW and EDIT tab. Selecting Edit changes the page to look very similar to a Word doc or a blog post. As you type in the box and save, clicking back to the View tab shows the page is immediately updated. With PBworks, a student can be editing a live web page in under 5 minutes.
Selecting Pages shows a list of pre-filled template pages that would work with an educator's account including syllabus and assignments. Editors can add pages here as needed and it can be organized into folders.
PBworks allows different types of users: page-level users can only access pages you explicitly give them access to; readers can view pages, but not edit; writers can view and edit pages; editors can view, edit, move and delete pages and folders; and administrators always can do anything on pages and folders. This is great for teachers because I can allow student access to just certain pages.
The last tab, Settings, offers a little bit of customization. Because this is an educator account, I can also create classroom accounts that will automatically generate usernames and passwords if my students don't have email accounts. I can also add my students on the Users tab by simply copying and pasting email addresses.
A few other features I like are the nested tables on the right side of the home page. The Sidebar can be edited like any other page. I can add links there, offer another navigation section, whatever I need. I also really like the Recent Activity section, so I can see which of my users are contributing and what they worked on. It also has a built-in plagiarism checker which would be a boon in any writing course.
AP Lang Uses
A wiki would work very well with teaching argumentative writing, one of the main modes of writing my students do throughout the year. I could create a page with sample argumentative essays, allowing students to read and comment on what they notice after reading the samples.
My student’s first argumentative essay is written in small groups. Using PBworks, students would have editing rights to the same page and create the essay there. As any teacher knows, often group work turns into a high achiever doing 90% of the work. With PBworks, I could actively see which students contributed and what their contributions were.
When students are ready to write their own arguments, they could have access to their own wiki page. It would be a really effective addition to the writing process because instead of arbitrarily setting up deadlines (rough draft 1, rough draft 2, final draft) other students could be fact-checking and offering editing and revisions throughout the writing process. Furthermore, publishing their essays to PBworks would add an authentic audience.
Learning Theory/Distributed Cognition
As a constructivist, a wiki would allow my students to build their knowledge through authentic experiences. Instead of writing to an audience of one, students will be collaborating and writing to a worldwide audience. By reading each other's arguments, they could begin applying effective argumentative tactics to their own writing. I am no longer the one directing all information to them; they are curating their own experiences and knowledge.
A wiki also offers many opportunities for distributed cognition. Right now I control our LMS, Canvas. Using a wiki as a shared space for my class would allow students to contribute a page of shared notes. Students could collaborate on mnemonic devices that help them remember the rhetorical situation. I think most teachers long for students to take ownership of their learning, and a wiki seems like a great way to build that ownership. With a wiki, students could have an authentic voice in the classroom and be able to add information to the class site that they want and need.
Conclusion
In 1994, my dad downloaded an image from a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab server of the Shoemaker-Levy comet crashing into Jupiter. He showed my mom, then downloaded it onto a floppy disk and took it to work where he gave it to a fellow science nerd. A week later, my mom called him into the living room where the 10 o’clock news was showing that very same image from the JPL. My dad looked at my mom and said, “We don’t even need them anymore. We make the media.”
What makes Wikipedia different than my beloved Encarta CD? In its final version, Encarta consisted of 62,000 articles. Wikipedia currently contains 6.1 million articles...just in English. With wikis, there are no more gatekeepers to information. Now, we make the media.
