Although students spend more and more time online, not all are truly tech savvy. Before using a blog or wiki, assess how comfortable your students are with the technology required.

Two of the newest online tools available to writing instructors, blogs and wikis, can be a boon to student writing, but instructors who have used them say it’s important to employ them purposefully.

For instance, blogs—online journals that include text, photos, videos, and Web links—emphasize one person’s perspective and are useful for monitoring students’ grasp of material.

Wikis, which allow students to create and revise Web pages quickly and easily, are ideal for group work. A wiki can be edited by anyone at any point in the process, and all revisions are recorded.

Associate Professor Jamie Callahan originally turned to blogs to solve a problem with one of her graduate courses. Callahan, who teaches in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development, knew her grad students weren’t doing the required reading for the class.

Callahan tried quizzes, one-minute in-class writing assignments, and mini-papers—to no avail.

“Those things took time away from class, and students weren’t really reflecting on the reading: they were simply trying to guess what I wanted them to say,” Callahan explains.

After attending a UWC workshop on teaching with blogs and wikis, Callahan asked students to write blog entries reflecting on assigned reading. It worked.

Callahan has now used blogs in a half-dozen classes and plans to continue.

“I feel certain that my students are not only learning more, but learning more deeply. Blogs enable that to happen,” she says. “Blogs became the vehicle for me to create the kind of learning atmosphere I wanted in class.”

Callahan can access her students’ blogs at any time to check progress. She knows who’s making regular entries and who’s posting five minutes before the deadline. And she—and other students—can offer feedback.

She assigns a nominal grade to the blog to make sure students follow through, although for some that’s not necessary.

“I’ve had some students continue to maintain the blog and use it to talk about other classes,” she notes.

For Nancy Small, a lecturer in the Department of English, it was a wiki that helped her solve a familiar teaching dilemma: knowing who contributed what in a group project.

She actually forbids students in her English 301 technical writing course from meeting in person. Instead, they’re required to use the wiki’s discussion forums and chats to complete their work.

“This helps me track their participation. At the end of the semester, if three people tell me the fourth in their group wasn’t contributing, I have a digital record to refer to,” she explains.

Wikis are also convenient— for Small and her students. “I think about doing this kind of project without a wiki. It would be doable, but clunky. A wiki streamlines it.”

She also thinks the wiki helps prepare students for the workplace: “Wikis are being used more and more in business. Students will inevitably encounter some form of collaborative work environment. It may not be called a wiki, but they could be working with one person from Bangladesh, one from New York, and one from Montreal, all on one document.”

Concern about her students’ future careers also prompted Small to add a blog to her advanced composition course. Her students keep a professional blog discussing their career goals and offering links to Web sites relevant to their field.

Small envisions the blogs as “online professional portfolios” that will supplement her students’ resumes when they apply for jobs or graduate school.

Before adding a blog or a wiki to a class, Callahan and Small suggest that instructors assess both their own technological capabilities and those of their students, who aren’t always as tech savvy as we assume. While Callahan says blogs truly “took no effort,” her one experiment with using a wiki failed, because neither she nor her students felt comfortable with it. She plans to try again, but only when she has more time to experiment.

Small and Callahan also agree that before adding a blog or wiki to a syllabus, instructors should consider what they hope students will gain. As Callahan sees it, instructors have to be “strategic about what they’re trying to accomplish and not use the technology because it’s the flavor of the day.”

Instructors interested in learning more about teaching with blogs or wikis are invited to attend a UWC faculty workshop on the subject on Monday, December 10th at 2 p.m. in Heldenfels 004. The workshop will be conducted by Candace Schaefer, associate director of the UWC, and Jeff Kurtz of Instructional Technology Services. To register, visit writingcenter.tamu.edu.