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ABSTRACT
On the basis of one teaching project carried out in a school, this article discusses collaborative writing in wiki platforms. It aims to find out what wiki reveals about pupils’ knowledge construction, creation, and division and their collaborative writing skills. In this project, wiki is treated as a useful tool for analyzing these processes because it gives us the possibility of studying those elements and stages of educative writing that are normally hidden from the teacher or researcher’s eye. Also, it shows us the interaction between pupils. The theoretical background of the project lies in collaborative writing and writing research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
2 The universities and teacher training units involved are: University of Leicester, UK, University of Alcalá, Spain, University of Lisboa, Portugal, Comenius University, Slovakia, Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey, and University of Helsinki, Finland.
3 Mentor teachers are subject teachers working in the University Training Schools. In addition to their subject expertise, they are qualified teacher educators.
4 For more detailed background information on the subject and its educational principles in the Finnish Curriculum, see Tainio and Grünthal (Citation2012).
5 The teachers received technical preparation and help prior to the project by attending a 90-minute wiki demonstration in the Department of Teacher Education (University of Helsinki). One student teacher created and planned the platform, and the IT-teacher assisted in the classroom during most of the lessons.
6 Within the scope of this article, it is not possible to discuss the parallel research projects in detail. The subject matter for the 8th grade was genres of fiction, whereas ‘gymnasium’ students practiced writing letters to the editor of a newspaper.
7 In this school, all lessons lasted for 75 minutes.
8 Henceforth we use the term ‘pair’, by which we refer also to those two single pupils who did not wish to work in pairs and to one group consisting of three pupils.
9 Despite of her sick leave, the mentor teacher continued following the project in wiki and participated in discussions at some points. This, of course, is not usual, but shows the commitment of the teacher and her motivation to participate in the project. Understandably, the Internet, with its email and possibilities for digital homework, has also been the subject of much criticism amongst teachers.
10 We use pseudonyms for the pupils involved in the project.
11 As we have earlier, the mentor teacher and the student teacher only commented on the starting phases and the choice of focus at the beginning of the project. They had decided not to comment on the later stages of the writing process.
12 It is worth noticing that neither the student teacher nor the mentor teacher point out spelling mistakes in any of the articles (in contrast to peers, as stated earlier in this article). As becomes clear in both cases discussed in this article, both final texts include spelling and/or grammatical errors which remain untouched from the very beginning until the final versions.
13 The role of wikipedia as a source of information is controversial, but it is not possible to discuss this more in the scope of this article. In the project described here, pupils were allowed to use wikipedia, and it was regarded as an equally authoritative source of information as others. The student teacher did, as we noted, remind pupils about real books, although the pupils did not use them.
14 Brevity is, of course, a relative matter. From an academic perspective the project was short, but not in terms of lessons student teachers conduct during their first phase of school practice. In this case the mentor teacher was willing to give the student teacher a larger number of lessons in order to provide her with the experience of carrying out a complete project.