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Doug Worsham

Making Wikis Work

Wikis are collaboratively produced Web pages that turn the dynamics of traditional writing assignments upside-down. They provide a motivating medium in which students engage in an extended writing process. While traditional assignments are generally written by a single author, finished, and then forgotten, Wiki assignments can be written and re-written multiple times by anyone in the class at any time. As a result, the distinctions between author, audience, and evaluator are blurred, allowing students and teachers to approach foreign language writing in entirely new ways. Short-term, limited focus homework assignments become highly extensible teaching tools. Authorship and ownership of a text, once limited to a single student, can now belong to the class as a whole. And most importantly, the writing assignment, once a lonely endeavor, becomes a collaborative social activity, much more capable of developing the student's overall communicative competence.

For more information on setting up a wiki projects at UW Madison see the links below. To discuss setting up a wiki project for your class, please email Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu).

University of Wisconsin WiscWiki Project

The WiscWiki Resource guide is a growing collection of the knowledge and experience we have on wikis in the UW-System. It is a place for those experienced with wikis to share their knowledge, and a launchpad for those just getting started.

The guide will become a rich source of information that representatives from throughout the UW-System can tailor to address the specific needs at their campuses. The information here could be a primary source for presentations, handouts, campus discussions and brown-bags, or the formation of local working groups.

Our hope is that as a central hub for information and discussion on wikis in the UW-System, this guide will spark new and creative ideas, and promote further exploration of what it means to make wikis an effective and well-integrated part of teaching and learning environments in the UW-System.

To get more information or to join this project, please contact me (doug@lss.wisc.edu). To see what we've been up to lately, visit us at http://wiscwikis.wikispaces.com.

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