Cindy Evans teaches a course at Skidmore College on the literature and culture of Quebec as part of an intermediate French series. Originally, her course was structured around students preparing lengthy oral presentations for their final project. As a teacher, though, she had always questioned the value of these for learning French.
Her alternative had always been to just have students work more individually, however, this too was an unsatisfactory approach.
As an experiment, she decided to replace the final oral presentation goal, with the construction of a mini-wikipedia about Quebec-French culture. This she hoped, would give students a perpetual sense of individual agency and ability to progress and learn independently, while at the same time being connected and learning from the rest of the class.
Motivation -- Cindy noted "The prospect of creating material for an authentic audience appeared to be the main motivation for the students", explaining how students would repeatedly and excitedly ask her about her plans to use their wiki materials after the class ended, and would often work on the wiki far longer than on a traditional assignment "rewriting and organizing it in a way they deemed worthy of future students’ interest."
Deep Engagement -- At the end of the class, Cindy found students actually wanted to present their wiki contributions orally, and that "unlike the oral reports on cultural topics in previous classes, the presentations in this class were done entirely without notes as students spoke confidently about their area of expertise."
Most important from my personal perspective of language learning, some students expressed that working with something as everyday as the wiki allowed them to reach a different relation with French language. Here they were naturally feeling comfortable with using language as a tool to express ideas, rather than as something objectified and explicitly dissected and analyzed for formal study.
I enjoyed the Wiki project more than anything else this semester. I had never made anything similar to it on the computer before, and as someone who usually hates computers, I found myself spending free minutes adding photos or extra links to my site just to improve my pages. I didn’t realize it as it was happening, but after completing the project I had learned a lot about the history of art in Quebec and also around the world. […] By looking at examples of the paintings I was able to understand more about the Quebec way of life and how the concept of being from Quebec has changed so drastically over the years...
Peer editing -- Once all the individual sub-projects were nearing completion, the class broke into three groups to work on the integration:
During this process, Cindy found "[Students] clearly demonstrated evidence of critical thinking in the comments offered during the peer editing process." It was at this stage that they visibly began to make the connections while objectively reviewing all of the sites. She pointed me to comments such as:
Are there differences between American and English influences? Maybe modern works (ie technology and computer based words or even American slang?) Talk about possible cultural issues with joual (reference to the play "Les Belles-Soeurs?") Link to other pages (Davids - music, Laura's - overview, etc.) ps - excellent page!
IT Staff! -- Naturally, the key for any technology-enhanced classroom is solid support in making the technology ready for the students. Unfortunately, from my perspective, in this case, the IT staff was more concerned about making things complicated enough to justify their jobs rather than actually doing their jobs. When Cindy first pointed to wikipedia and asked the IT staff if they could set her up with a systems like that, they responded that the servers they had already spent months setting up would not be able to support PHP/MySQL, and hence any of the services she required. They failed to mention that at a cost of about $0.50 a month -- including all maintainance, support, etc -- Cindy could have bypassed them, got a site5.com account and chosen form over 30 content management systems at a press of a button to be set up in under 15 seconds. Alternatively, she could have used the actual wikipedia software for free via www.wikicities.org -- again, completely bypassing the IT staff and empowering the teacher directly.
Unfortunately, the IT staff promised Cindy they would come up with a workaround solution. In the meantime, Cindy had students prepare their material offline, to be placed into the wiki once it was available. Half-way through the semester, the IT staff provided Cindy with a raised-from-the-swamp wannabe wiki system called oddmuse, which did not require PHP/MySQL. Unfortunately, the system was very difficult to use and no students were able to properly format their contributions. As a result, much of the wiki was an unnavigable mess. Given that this could have easily been avoided had Cindy known about services like wikiwyg.net, it points to a much larger issue: How can teachers be empowered to know directly about their available resources for a given project, without having to rely on their IT staff, given that the formal institutions such as the textbook publishers have no interest in supporting them on these cutting-edge endeavors?