Indeed. I have had teachers try (enthusiastically try!) to do the collaborative wiki writing thing and then find themselves reverting to individual papers because it is not only familiar to them and the students, but it is a genre of learning activity that fits more easily within the dominant assessment regime. At least in American high schools.
Phoebe, you totally nailed it with the observation about professors often requiring original research. They do it because that's a fabulous way to learn and it underscores an important tension: the policies of Wikipedia were devised to support encyclopedia writing, not learning.
Often it's productive for learners to freely explore wrong ideas in detail, to develop their interpretations, etc. These kinds of issues are precisely why I set up a student writing wiki separate from Wikipedia, so that there would be freedom to ask students to write in many different ways without bothering Wikipedians. In particular, I really wanted them to be free to use original research and explore possibilities. That's not to say that they don't eventually often write material that is encyclopedic and appropriate for Wikipedia, but the process is just different.
Andrea
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Janet Hawtin lucychili@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
I haven't watched the profession, but the sentence "students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia" makes me cringe. One can only hope the professors introduced them to (or understood) the norms and policies of the site, and didn't require original research...
/me vouches for the tension between the individual paper as a product and the collaborative participative wiki as a community and a process. at some point you have to choose between one or the other model and it is tricky if you dont know which youre doing up front - especially for the co-authors.
j
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