As an English and Media Studies teacher at a secondary school near Bristol, I am currently experiencing first hand the challenges of new media technologies, both as content for Media Studies A Level courses, and as opportunities for learning in the English classroom.

My Media Studies A Level students and I are tackling some of the developments in new media, with concepts such as ‘convergence’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘virtuality’ offering ways of thinking critically. However, in this article it is my recent and ongoing experiences of setting up and using a type of website known as a ‘wiki’ with students that I want to share. Although I am currently involved in five wiki projects (they can be addictive!), I want to reflect on two particular education-based wiki projects that I have begun with different student groups: www.kinglear.pbwiki.com, set up with a cross-curricular year 12 King Lear screenplay project group; and www.gordanoyear7english.pbwiki.com, set up with my Year 7 English class.

Wikis and how they work

I have been a regular visitor to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) and Wikinews (en.wikinews.org) for some time now (web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia and news websites respectively, both collaboratively written; (see the info file in itp 52), but the idea of setting up wiki sites for students was first suggested to me while working on an education project called Enquiring Minds. This is a new three-year research and development project run by Bristol-based NESTA Futurelab and funded by Microsoft’s ‘Partners in Learning’ initiative. The project, launched in the summer of 2005, seeks to investigate how children can be effective in shaping their own learning. At its heart is the desire to enable young people to take personal responsibility for their own learning, shifting the emphasis from what they learn to how they learn, and promoting student ownership, creativity and collaboration on purposeful projects and investigations.

Operating along the same lines as Wikipedia and Wikinews, and in keeping with the spirit of the Enquiring Minds project, a ‘wiki’ is a group of web pages that can be created, added to and edited, all quickly and easily. It is like creating HTML pages, but much simpler. There is a simple editing code (explained on the site) that uses punctuation marks to indicate the size and font of words. When you set up a wiki, you can create a password and then the site can be edited by anyone who has access to that password, which could for example be a particular teaching group. In this sense such sites offer real potential for students (and teachers) to work collaboratively to store and share information.

The King Lear screenwriting project

The King Lear wiki site was created to offer a solution to a particular problem encountered at the early stages of a screenplay project. A level English Literature, Art, Media and Design and Technology students at my school are currently working to devise a screenplay version of King Lear. The first stage (at which the students are currently working) has been for a group of student writer-editors to edit the text down to 1 hour, considering its current relevance and perhaps working to re-locate the play in a contemporary setting. (The students ultimately decided to set it in a media environment, with Lear as a sort of media mogul!) I held a mixture of weekend and after school workshops to set this up and provide opportunities for student discussion at the early stages of editing.

The text students initially worked on was an electronic version of King Lear copied from a website, with each of the 5 Acts copied as a different document. A pen drive was used to copy them onto the students’ own user areas. Another option would have been to put them onto the school network and have students copy them from there.

One significant problem that the scene editors began to face was how to share the scenes so that they could be passed around for editing and re-editing. Initially, we had decided that everyone would email them to me as word documents and that I would then collect them together and put them onto an area on the school intranet. However, not only did this put all onus on me, it also meant the whole group could not see the edited scenes as they were submitted, and so had no sense of how the play was taking shape.

The King Lear wiki site

As a response to this problem and with the encouragement of researchers on the Enquiring Minds project mentioned earlier, I set up the King Lear wiki. I posted the King Lear Acts from the word documents to the site, creating a hyperlink for each of the Acts and then introduced the site to students. The site has enabled them to edit the scenes online or (as we have discovered only one person can be editing an area of the site at a time) paste their edited scenes on to the site in the appropriate place and cut the original corresponding scene. Wikis have the capacity to evolve and one useful addition to the site has been a chart, posted by one student and developed into a table with columns by another, where the students can keep a record of who is editing which scenes and what stage they are at in terms of editing.

I anticipate the site will offer a number of benefits. When we come to distribute scenes to actors and other parties involved, photocopying should be minimal. Students can be responsible for learning lines from the site, and can be individually responsible for printing out scenes as and when they need them; changes can also be shared and collaborated on without the distribution of new paper copies. One issue with a project like this (running alongside students’ academic studies) is maintaining interest and enthusiasm through pressure periods (e.g. the January exams). Another benefit then, should be that as changes can be tracked on the site, when the site remains inactive for a significant period you can pick up on lull periods, and reignite interest as and when necessary.

This editing process is ‘live’ until the end of January, when I will review it. The King Lear Screenplay project will be ongoing throughout the year.

The Year 7 wiki site
The Year 7 wiki was set up in the context of the Enquiring Minds project referred to above. Initially it was presented to students as an online space for them to share and comment on their book reviews. I chose to introduce the wiki site to the class in small groups and followed this up with a lesson where I used the newly installed wireless network in the English faculty area to get students to edit the page in class. In this way, students modelled how easy it was to use the site as they typed in their ideas and saved them straight onto the site.

As a homework task, I asked students to visit the wiki, click on the hyperlinks to read a selection of book reviews, pick a book review and post a comment on it. Students were also encouraged to be creative with the home page, and to make any further hyperlinks that they might like to have on the site. Over half the class visited the site in the two days following its introduction. With the ‘changes’ hyperlink I have been able to trace the level of activity and identify who has been active on the site.

It is fair to say that the level of student activity on the site has been really pleasing. The site changes daily, and one issue is how or whether to record the different areas that exist on a daily/ weekly basis. If you visit the site at www.gordanoyear7english.pbwiki.com you will notice a number of hyperlinks have been added by the students, including ‘PostYourCommentsHere’ and ‘OurOwnStories’. It is interesting to note that while the students have not really changed the page layout, they have been inventive in terms of the sections of the site they have created through hyper-linking.

The ‘Book Reviews Of 7P’ was a hyperlink agreed to in class whereas the section ‘PostYourCommentsHere’ enables students to visit and post comments on how they want to develop the site (particularly if they have an idea but don’t quite know how to follow it through e.g. in terms of creating a link) and how they feel about the site. A similar section exists at the top of the page so at present there is some overlap. In addition, it seems as though the students are simultaneously developing the ‘OurOwnStories’ link as an anything goes area, while also creating hyperlinks that encourage a structure with postings organised according to their genre. For example, there is now a ‘Jokes’ section, ‘Songs’ section, and ‘Christmas Picture’ section. The link to Book Reviews has been created with spaces between the words, something the students managed without my help.

The site has given students a space to express themselves creatively. The ‘Our Own Stories’ section includes some playful as well as earnest work, and it will be interesting to see how sections such as ’ItsNotWeirdItsJustDifferent’ and ‘AgonyAunt’ develop.

As the teacher behind this project, I aim to respond to the site as it is developed by students. I recently constructed a class warm up activity involving translating a Vicki Pollard diary entry posted by a student into Standard English. This activity had already been suggested to me by a colleague; using an entry written by a member of the class seemed a useful way to develop it.

The potential of wikis in education

From my as yet limited experience of using them, wiki sites seem to me to offer real possibilities for collaborative group work projects; they have also worked well as an online space for sharing student work and ideas, for example including teacher/lesson-directed writing, as well as student-driven projects. This latter possibility can offer students a much-needed space for play and experimentation, which on the sites I have been involved in has ranged from frivolous and quirky comments, to studious and carefully composed contributions (both of which seem to me to be of value).

Of the wiki sites I have set up, the King Lear wiki best illustrates the potential of such websites for collaborative projects involving students who might otherwise be somewhat disparate (belonging to different classes and/or studying different subjects). The Year 7 site is perhaps the most rapidly developing, and offers a good example of how wikis can be used for sharing individual students’ work (including jokes, poems, songs, stories and book reviews) as well as opening up possibilities for writing more collaboratively than the classroom context enables.

Over the course of the year I hope to collaborate with the English teaching team to encourage the use of wikis across the whole of Year 7. It is too early to tell how the sites might develop, but I also envisage the site being used to share work and collaborate across the curriculum. If you are interested in following this development, keep your eye on www.gordanoyear7english.pbwiki.com and watch what happens!

© Andrea Bird 2006