What did I expect when I set out to get students to use the wiki? I dont think I really expected much. The minimum they had to do was create two pages and write at least 1500 words in the wiki (this for 40% of their grade). The two pages consisted on one technical page and one social/business application of technology page. I figured this would be a fair assignment, not requring too much effort, yet getting them involved in both learning processes and creating learning outcomes. They also had to journal their experiences of the wiki with some reflection on their learning (15% of their grade). The third aspect of assessment was styled participation and was to be extracted from the wiki. Participation in this case included every login, every update, every comment, private messages, blog posts, whatever they actually did. It gave a measurable value to their participation, something that I knew I could point to as ‘hard evidence’ of participation rather than the vague and subjective measures of classroom participation in face-to-face classes (I’ve always had a problem with these kinds of measures as students often conflate participation and presence). The only thing the wiki didn’t log was their movement around the site, what they read, etc. This would have given a clear indication of their vicarious participation/interaction which is clearly different from the more active forms of participation that we grade. But yes, the activities in the wiki accounted for 70% of their grades (the other 30% was development of a website, an assessment item I’m considering dropping in favour of a short exam, but I’ll get to that later).

So, I expected at least two pages to be created per student. I figured with the cap for this class to be about 30 students, that would result in probably 60 pages to assess. That seemed manageable, given that actually assessing the pages was something I had no idea how to do at the beginning, particularly given that I needed to be sure what each student was responsible for.

What did I get? Well, instead of 60 pages, I got nigh on 160 pages. Not all of the pages were good content and there seemed to be a tendency for students to ‘own’ them by signing them or in same way linking them to their perceived notion of output (I really need to examine all the pages individually to check this). Assessing the pages became a real headache as some were edited by only a single person while the most was 20, and oh bugger, my excel file has been corrupted. Will continue this anon.