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Writing Showcase: Joe Grohens

How Wikis Improved Upon the Writing Laboratory

Tools: MediaWiki

Instructor: Joe Grohens

Course: Business & Technical Writing 261: Principles of Technical Communication

Students: junior and senior Engineering and business majors with little writing experience

Learning Objectives: develop discipline-specific writing skills, especially an awareness of distinctions between highly technical, professional documents and genres of writing for more general audience

Pedagogical Model: the writing laboratory, including brainstorming, research, peer review, multiple drafts, frequent writing practice, discussion, evaluation by writer, peers, instructor

Online Writing Affordances: easy to manage and compose; social and collaborative; wiki may be particularly well-suited to technical writing and science and engineering students who enjoy frequent and small edits and improvements on their product; wiki archive of versions/revisions is perfectly suited to replace the traditional writing instructors emphasis and review of multiple drafts

Resistance & Concerns: public writing may be intimidating for some; wiki is still a new, untried and unproven technology for many instructors and teachers

Strategies for Campus Adoption: campus-run and campus-wide wiki service or wiki-like tools developed for learning management systems; campaigns that can address fears of collaboration and loss of accountability associated with collective writing; develop exemplars in each discipline; library programs that raise awareness of strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia as an information resource