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Towards a Process for K-12 Students as Content Producers

Beyond the Blog - Leveraging Wikis for Curriculum & Instruction

I am frequently asked to clarify what I mean by "students as producers of content", and how that would fit into a school district’s curriculm. This outlines in brief fashion an approach doing just that using wiki-based collaborative writing technologies.

Our primary use of wikis in the district started out with collaborative curriculum content production. It’s what we’ve been referring to as our "Currwikulum process" for a few years. We crack ourselves up, and can only imagine Elmer Fudd as our spokesmodel.

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17 Apr 09

Colin Jones
16 Apr 09

Paul Jinks
Leveraging wikis for curriculum and instruction.

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Mr. Spraul
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15 Apr 09

Ryan Bretag
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Bob Furst
- These non-sequential stages of the writing process vary by author, but this is a widely accepted description:
  
  Planning & Pre-Writing: Getting your ideas, interests, and/or assignment parameters
  Collaborating: Most workplace writing involves collaborative production of writing
  Researching: Seeking information to support your writing
  Drafting: Forming thought while writing about the topic
  Editing: Deciding what needs to change
  Reviewing: Getting the opinions of others about what you’ve written
  Revising: Making changes you’ve decided through editing and reviewing work
  Publishing: Connecting the writer to the reader by making a finished product more widely available and public
Jenny Gridley
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Shea Smith
Beyond the Blog - Leveraging Wikis for Curriculum & Instruction

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Lauren Panton
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Steve Ransom
Towards a Process for K-12 Students as Content Producers

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Will Richardson
Our primary use of wikis in the district started out with collaborative curriculum content production. It’s what we’ve been referring to as our "Currwikulum process" for a few years. We crack ourselves up, and can only imagine Elmer Fudd as our spokesmodel.

For the most part, curriculum is still our most imporant use. In the last year or two, however, we have begun to see wiki tools as having a direct connection to classroom writing instruction, place-based educational projects, and other activities requiring student content production. This blog entry is a rough look at how we see wikis for instructional use in the classroom from the viewpoint of students as producers, not just consumers of wiki content.

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- Our primary use of wikis in the district started out with collaborative curriculum content production. It’s what we’ve been referring to as our "Currwikulum process" for a few years. We crack ourselves up, and can only imagine Elmer Fudd as our spokesmodel.
  
  For the most part, curriculum is still our most imporant use. In the last year or two, however, we have begun to see wiki tools as having a direct connection to classroom writing instruction, place-based educational projects, and other activities requiring student content production. This blog entry is a rough look at how we see wikis for instructional use in the classroom from the viewpoint of students as producers, not just consumers of wiki content.
- Teachers who use do Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs for Writing Process style instruction in the K-12 classroom can use wiki tools as the next logical step. Contributing to a wiki site, such as our Open Content Curriculum site in BSSD, or Wikipedia itself would subject that written content to peer and outside scrutiny and editing by other users of that site.
- 7 more annotations...
- - Our school district had already been encouraging our teachers and students to use our system in a similar process this for a year or so at at the time of Dr. Groom’s presentation. The BSSD wiki also uses Mediawiki software, like Wikipedia, and all of our students must learn how to post basic wikitext content as part of our regular curriculum. We currently have 11,500 student and teacher created pages of content.
    Will Richardson on 2009-04-15
    
    Pretty amazing site.
  - Perhaps one of the barriers to wider acceptance is a way to quantify and "grade" student alternative products posted to a wiki. Even in our district, where all know the basics of Mediawiki editing, teachers expressed doubts about how to evaluate student-contributed content.
    Will Richardson on 2009-04-15
    
    Setting the table for wiki assessment.
  - It seems intuitive to me that student-contributed content that "lasted", or was "changed less" over time in a high traffic wiki would be of higher quality than that which was removed by other users or moderators. The problem for educators then becomes one of visualizing and quantifying the raw data from the history page for the article, and deciding the relative importance and "shelf life" of the contributions.
    
    Fortunately, some new tools exist that offer great promise for visualizing wiki contributions, and gauging the frequency and lasting impact of user contributions.
  - The full size view of the screen makes it far, far easier to visualize the contributions to the page across several domains. It takes the top user contributions and distributes them over both a scatter plot of activity, and and graph of relative impact.
    Will Richardson on 2009-04-15
    
    Pretty amazing tool.
  - Now assessing the value of any contribution is still tricky, and in our thinking we would not only be assigning credit to students who had "lasting" contributions. That would be a badge of honor, or a sign of exceptional work.
    
    Students would also get credit for the process of engaging in the contribution, for any dialogue as other page contributors debated the merit or worthiness of the content, and for identifying where content was needed in context of what the classroom work going on.
    
    At the level of our wiki in BSSD, students who identify holes and needs to flesh out standards and resources to support those standards are certainly demonstrating understanding. Finding and linking key instruction resources to support instruction demonstrate understanding.
  - Could a K-12 student anywhere in the country, rural or urban, find something that he or she connects with, is passionate about, or is particularly relevant to his or her "place"? I would think so. That is the beauty of place-based education, and writing for an authentic audience. Think about the "Foxfire" project in Appalachia in the 1970’s, and the wonderful work done there having students write and publish about their folkways as "experts". Urban students have just as much or more to help document in the cities surrounding their schools.
  - With Wikipedia, however, it is very difficult to find a topic that is completely untouched. Does that mean K-12 students have no area that they can demonstrate content or concept cometence on? Not at all. It just means that the contribution is likely to be smaller, less a portion of the total knowledge base posted on that topic.