by Keunwoo Lee
I used a wiki when I taught CSE 341 (programming languages) in winter quarter 2004, and was generally pleased with the results. John Zahorjan also used the wiki in the Spring 2004 software design capstone, and Martin Tompa used a wiki for CSE490MT. JZ, at least, has told me that it worked out well.
Mark Guzdial of Ga. Tech has been using wikis for his courses for some time (for a recent incarnation, see Computer Music CoWeb); the Ga. Tech CoWeb group has been doing some research on the subject. Note that, unlike our CSE 341 and CSE 481 wikis, Guzdial used the wiki itself as the main course page.
Here are some lessons from my own experience:
Most students will not use the wiki, at first, unless specifically prompted.
I told students to create a user account and then make at least one edit of their choice. In retrospect this was a little artificial but it got students familiar with the wiki concept.
Have each group maintain their own wiki page. I made the preparation of a wiki page part of the requirements for the final project. This worked fairly well; see the results.
I only had people do group projects twice in the quarter. This was a pedagogical mistake in more ways than one, but in any case compare the richer team documents in JZ's software capstone wiki, which had an ongoing group project throughout the quarter.
We used the wiki as a quick-and-dirty discussion board, with discussion pages specific to each topic (for example, we had a discussion page for ML). However, as you can see, only a few students posted questions.*
If I were doing this again, I would have one question-and-answer page for all class-related questions, rather than separate subject pages. Students might be more likely to bookmark this one page and visit it frequently. The TA and instructor should archive old questions to topical pages as they go out of date.
* OTOH this is still a good result, because CSE majors don't seem to use class mailing lists anymore for discussions. Class mailing lists have become strictly a venue for announcements from the course staff. A weak discussion board is better than none.
If you use the wiki as a discussion board or a set of links to resources, instructional staff will have to provide answers and links respectively. Note, however, that editing the wiki is no harder than editing a static course web page or writing email, which you would have to do anyway.
If you use the wiki solely for group project collaboration, you may have to invest less effort. Even then, you will probably get the most out of it by scanning the group pages periodically and making suggestions.
Our wikis, as currently set up, do not have special support for namespaces. Don't worry about it. Wikipedia has 1,000,000+ articles and they don't need namespaces (for ordinary articles). Name collisions are not generally a problem. Just use descriptive page names and things will be fine.
(If name collisions someday become a problem, it is easy to move a page while preserving its edit history. Redirecting incoming links takes a little more effort, but unless our wiki grows really huge this should not be a significant problem. By then, the MediaWiki software may have better support for automating this process.)
You have several options here:
You might want to restrict wiki access to students in the university or students enrolled in the class, using whatever web access controls your computing support provides.
I personally don't like doing this, because it hinders students from sharing stuff they put on the wiki with other people. It also means search engines won't find your wiki. There is value, both for yourself and for others, in having content on the public Internet, rather than the "invisible Internet" living behind access restricted barriers. Lastly, a wiki will see more use if people don't have to go through the trouble of logging in to use it.
One intermediate point to consider is to restrict edits to logged-in users, but permit viewing by all.