Facilitating Collaboration - Session Four

For the class this week, we're to start a wiki or Ning and I have half a mind to use one that I just created for my Forensic Science final exam. My class has no textbooks and so I often copy off various print sources for my students and provide additional online resources through the class Moodle. When starting this class, I decided to play around with the idea of having the students create the class text in a wiki (Ning is blocked at our school) as their final exam. I set up the wiki and created pages that would be like the chapters in a book. Next, I added members (I created user names and passwords for the students that contained no identifying information in case the wiki is ever made public) and checked to be sure that all students had access. Finally, I assigned students to groups and pages that they would be editing together. During our final exam periods the students created content following a rubric we had put together the previous day. I gave them three days to edit and in the process, students created a few new pages and re-organized the groups while working in etherpad to be sure that each student was contributing. Creating this wiki (I've opened it up to a protected status so that you can see what we're up to) was our trial and error session that I will use to plan out and create a new wiki for facilitating collaboration. I'm hoping to include the podcast I'm working on. I've scripted out an explanation of one of the anatomy labs we do to study the effects of muscle fatigue.