Carving Out our Own Space: Wiki-making in Room 5-10

I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to offer an analysis of a project in which my students, my co-teachers, and I are currently engaged. The over-arching goal of the project was to teach our students some research skills without resorting to the same methods that we learned as high school students. This goal grew out of a concern that the research methods we developed in college differed drastically from the index-card methods of yesteryear. Furthermore, we wanted to provide meaningful and practical learning for students whose careers eliminated the need for college yet still demanded the skills of finding and organizing information. Our dilemma, then, was to fit the important content of research skills into the new forms of our day.

Planning and Justification
As my colleagues--Julianna Tress and Judi Russo--and I fleshed out the details for the research project, we puzzled most over the medium of presenting the research. Conventional methods seemed cumbersome here: to have students research information in hard copy texts, take hand-written notes, and then present their findings in a 5 page paper seemed too abstract and foreign for our students. And so, we tried to imagine different mediums that would elicit the same skills--finding, manipulating and organizing information. We thought of websites, podcasts, video recordings of interivews, a documentary, and too many other ideas to list here. As we calculated the necessary (and available) technology, we ultimately settled on having the students create a wiki using the free, hosted software at Wikispaces. A wiki, we reasoned, would allow them to create a taxonomy of information, list sources for their research findings, and to work on writing the text in smaller chunks.

The Project
The gist of the project is a six-week group research project formatively assessed with deadlines and summatively assessed by a final product--a wiki. Each week, with the exception of the fourth, the students were responsible for handing in (sharing) a document that shows that they met the weekly deadline. The first week was slated for choosing a topic and generating questions to guide research. The second we planned to research answers to the questions, using both library resources and general internet resources. The third week was dedicated to organizing the information first through a mind map and then a formal outline. The fourth and fifth week were setup for writing and editing the copy or text to go on the wiki. And then the final week was to be spent transferring the text to the wiki and editing the style of the pages. Ultimately, the project should produce a five page wiki--each student in a group of four would be responsible for one of the four subpages with a joint effort on the front page.

The Problem Areas
Before talking about why we really like the project, let me outline a few of the problematic areas we have found as we've been working with the students.
1. One week was insufficient to teach mini-lesson on research methods and to give students time for guided practice. The obvious solution to this would be requiring students to complete research outside of classroom, but our general modus operendi has been to keep all of the work in the classroom because of our students' general resources at home and at public spaces.
2. Allowing students to select topics for research necessitated a wider variety of research venues than we anticipated. Topics such as Jersey Shore, partying or even vice in Camden were not easily researched using the wonderful resources that our school library has. Instead, we had to modify, en media res, to help our students find appropriate and informative websites, articles, etc.
3. We ran into a great deal of pacing problems as well because this is our first time working through the project. We've been discovering a great deal about the constraints of working with technology in the classroom. In a certain sense, this has been teaching us all a great deal of patience as well as ingenuity with computers and internet browsing. On some levels, I see this as a bit of success because it's building skills in our students to make them less dependent on a school setting with a teacher looking over their shoulder. Still, we've learned a great deal about adapting projects and stretching our expectations and parameters.

The Success
Throughout the project, we've met with an agreable disposition from our students, and as many of you know, this is a success in and of itself. Even our most problematic students have been at least absorbed in their work, and therefore, they haven't had the opportunity to engage in "non-learning" activities. This has been a certain success for us, at least from a class room management perspective. But we've also had some academic successes: our students have developed (or honed) their analytic skills as they have appraised various websites, databases, and search engines in pursuit of the questions they have developed. While this is a bit more staged than an organic research opportunity (think about the last time you watched a how-to video or looked for reviews of a particular product), the formalization of what we all are already doing has provided the students with an opportunity to reflect upon their learning and skills. This is somewhat like reading poetry: the formality of the poem forces us to become reflective on its means as well as its meaning. Pardon the literary analogy.

Here's the meat of my post, and my real reason for taking the time to write it. Despite the difficulties and experimental nature of our project, we have met with a great deal of academic and interpersonal success. By finding out the kinds of things our students are interested in and guiding them into an organized knowledge about that topic, we've begun to establish a different and perhaps better sort of rapport with them. I'd like to think that this rapport is based on our willingness to learn alongside our students, adapt to real world circumstances, and engage in academic activities that might actually matter to them. In my mind, this is the goal of teaching in the 21st century. And though I detest buzzwords and trendy ways of discussing things, I have to admit that this kind of timely project provides the context in which our kids can at least possibly thrive, learning skills that actually prepare them for the digital world in which we--as American adults--are already thriving. This is mainly a philosophic arrangement of the successes we have encountered as we've been doing the project, but we will keep you up to date via comments as we meet--one hopes--with continual success as a group of learners in room 5-10.