Wiki Assignments
Wikis are collaborative spaces where students can work together and share their work. Wikis can be used several different ways in online courses:
- small group collaboration
- whole class projects
- galleries of student work
Small Group Collaboration
For small group collaboration, wikis provide a space where everyone can work to create a project together. Rather than using a discussion forum and attaching documents which must be uploaded and downloaded by each individual every time a change is made, everyone edits the same page. The most current version is always visible, but a history of revisions is also available. Wikis allow the facilitator (and everyone else) to see individual participant contributions in the history.
Whole Class Projects
Wikis also allow the entire class to contribute to a single document. This is usually most effective for something like a resource list or glossary. The Positive and Needs-Benefit Statements you created in Activity 2-B-1 are an example of this kind of project. It can be unwieldy for an entire class to contribute to something like a single lesson plan where students would edit each others' work; those kinds of collaborative projects are best with smaller groups.
List assignments can work well in a large group wiki. You could, of course, have a discussion forum where everyone posts resources to share, but it is more challenging to compile those ideas into one document to save/copy/print. The wiki keeps the final product intact and easy to retrieve.
Galleries of Student Work
Wikis can also be used as a place to create a "gallery" of individual student work. For example, when participants create lesson plans and are asked to provide peer feedback, the lesson plans can be posted to the wiki. Discussion forums usually require that lesson plans are attached and must be downloaded. Some participants, especially those on slow connections, may be more likely to review more than the minimum peer examples if they are easier to access. A wiki makes it easy to see all the examples collected in one place.