A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

314 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
students to study a specific intervention or administration in greater depth while
developing student skills in basic web page creation.
Initially I asked the students to work in groups of four or five to produce a
series of web pages investigating a particular case study. While some of the
resulting student work was quite good, the process was not as creative as I
had hoped. Feedback from the students also identified a number of problems.
Many had found the technical process of creating pages in a basic web editor
difficult and there were the perennial complaints about the difficulties of working
with students who were not as academically strong or did not share the group’s
work ethic.
With this in mind I was open to the idea of adopting a wiki as an alternative.
I hoped it would overcome the problems that students had identified the year
before. Instead of small groups, the 35 students on the module would work
together in the creation of a wiki on US foreign policy since 1975. They could
choose to create pages about specific presidents, administrations or interventions.
In addition, the wiki format would allow students to choose to work with others
or work on their own sections individually. Both of these hopes were fulfilled:
students found wiki style a flexible and simple format for creating pages
and were quickly forming ad hoc working groups to work on topics that
interested them.
However, there were other more subtle changes taking place that made the wiki
a much more effective learning experience. It was a microcosm of the wider
academic community, with students operating as authors, editors, reviewers and
publishers of academic work. Students’ responses to feedback on their work from
their peers were much more passionate than when I commented on it. After some
initial friction they became more effective at offering constructive criticism of
each other’s work and developed a method for collaborating on the development
of specific pages. As a group they set their own standards for both content
and presentation and policed content for plagiarism. By the end of the project
they had not only built a very useful revision site, but they had a real sense of the
issues that professional historians have to face up to in the process of publishing
their work.
The wiki also threw up real challenges for me as a teacher. Judging the level of
tutor intervention was difficult: initial progress was slow and I had to give an
overall structure to the project. There were also real issues in terms of assessment.
Should I reward outcomes or contributions to the process of making the wiki?
How do you reward people who develop great skills in wiki style, but are weaker
in terms of historical analysis? In the end I agreed a rubric for assessment after
consultation with the student group, who felt that people who were active in the
group processes should be rewarded. More practically it was a considerable task