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Tema: Nuevos Lenguajes y EducaciónThe victorian web and the victorian course wiki: comparingthe educational effectiveness of identical assignments inweb 1.0 and web 2.01 IntroductionIn September 2008, Landow delivered an invited keynote atWikiSym2008, an annual ACM international conference, in Porto,Portugal entitled “When a Wiki is not a Wiki: Twenty Years ofthe Victorian Web” in which he argued that the 45,000 documentsthat then made up www.victorianweb.org function as a moderatedwiki and that, therefore, Web 1.0 can function much as Web2.0 and has done so for many years. Members of both the programcommittee and the audience (see the acknowledgements)invited Landow to use actual wiki software and compare the resultsof using one to that of using the Victorian Web. Landowaccepted the challenge and compared student performance andinstructor’s workload in two iterations of a Brown UniversityEnglish class, English 0600J S01 [CRN 25281], Madmen, Mystics,Monsters, Prophets, and Perverts, which despite its sensational titletakes the form of a quite traditional survey of British Victorianpoetry, fiction, and nonfiction.The Spring 2009 and Spring 2010 versions of the course hadessentially the same enrollments and a similar distribution ofstudents. In a manner typical of Brown University, they rangedfrom first- and second-year students, including those in Brown’s8-year medical program, and a sprinkling of third- and fourth-yearundergraduates from the physical and social sciences, severalof whom produced outstanding performances in the class,receiving A grades, even though English 0600J was their firstuniversity literature class.In order to create a control group for the planned evaluation,in Spring 2009 Landow taught the class as before using the VictorianWeb. The following year (Spring 2010) Landow taught thesame class with an identical syllabus, again used the VictorianWeb for readings and the students’ background or contextual readings,but students now placed their weekly discussion-questionassignments, which serve as the core of the class and which aredescribed below, directly on a password-protected wiki createdwith Confluence software from Atlassian. Confluence was chosenbecause this was the software used by Brown University’sInstructional Technology Group and some students were familiarwith it.Since experiments with placing the same materials in threevery different hypermedia environments had clearly demonstratedthat students understood these systems to contain the samematerial, or as they put it, the same hypertexts (Landow andKahn, 1992), Landow wanted to see if students using both aWiki and a moderated website had similar experiences and gainedas much educationally. Since more recent work had shownthat students made much greater use of the essential connectivityof hypertext when instructors explained the potentials of theinformation technology (Landow and Miller 2010), Landow alsowanted to see if that affected their use of the wiki as it had theiruse of the Victorian Web.2. Organization of this paperTo place the results of the comparison in its proper context,the following discussion (a) briefly describes the composition, history,and authorship of the Victorian Web, the core documentsof which have existed in multiple hypermedia environments sincetheir creation in beginning 1988 for the Brown University Intermediaproject (Yankelovitch et al. 1988, Hahn et al. 1992, Kahn 1993).Next (b) it presents the assignment used for student contributionsin 2009 to the Victorian Web and the following year to the VictorianWiki. It then (c) explains goals of this assignment, after which (d) itsets forth the advantages and disadvantages of using the wiki.88 Educación y Ciudad N o 25 Julio - Diciembre de 2013 ISSN 0123-0425 pp. 85-106