We’re starting to get some traction with wikis in our district. One of our social studies teachers is using Moodle’s wiki module in her 7th grade geography class for a unit on Asia. She created a skeleton outline in the wiki, providing a bulleted list of topics like landforms, climate, history, food, climate, etc. Then the students jumped in and started adding images, additional information, and hyperlinks.
We talked yesterday about assessing student work in the wiki. It’s possible, of course, to look at the history of each wiki page to see who contributed what content. You can also imagine how cumbersome it would be for a teacher to go back through the history of each page looking at diffs and scoring each student’s work. Self-assessment is an obvious option, but I’m wondering how others have approached this issue. How are you assessing wikis? I’m all ears.
This is a non-trivial problem. I’d think you’d have to approach this pretty much like any group work and subdivide the class–this group works on the landforms page, etc. If everyone is working on everything, I’d think assessment would be pretty much impossible.
Wikis may end up being more beneficial in making the work more authentic by giving it more life outside and beyond the class _after_ the initial work has been done in a relatively traditional way.
The “subdivide and conquer” strategy came up in our discussion. Unfortunately, I think you lose a lot of “wikiness” when you do that.