Faculty Spotlight: Rick Schneider

Sharing Student Projects Through Wikis
Illustration Survey, Fall 2009

Introduction

In Rick Schneider's traditional face-to-face art history course, students had little opportunity to share perspectives or engage in dialogue about artists. After learning about wikis, Rick set up this tool to enhance student engagement with the content. He created an environment where students could research and collaboratively profile artists to share with the class. By creating this space, Rick was able to engage the students in a lively discussion about the artists they were viewing.

Timeline

In June of 2009, Rick participated in the Online Course Development Seminar. Through that seminar and attendance at various other workshops, he began to see the value of a shared online environment, even in a face-to-face lecture class. Rick then decided to build a wiki for his illustration Survey course. After completing research on his own, he was able to figure out how to create one.

Equipment

• Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com)

Process

Rick set up a wiki with module pages for each of his course topics. In response to each module, students were required to create their own wiki page featuring an artist in that weeks' genre. The students created artist profiles, incorporating text, images and video. The students then commented on each others' pages with constructive feedback. In this way students were able to share what they were learning, and create a rich repository for the various artists explored throughout the course.

Outcome

In the wiki, students were able to view each others work in a way they hadn't before. This gave students exposure to more artists than they would have had time for in the classroom. According to Rick, "The students clearly benefited from the shared insight. They engaged in dialog about content, agreed or disagreed about conclusions, and read about topics outside their own required writing." In terms of assessment, the transparency of the activity in the wiki allowed Rick to easily see who was contributing.

Rick's Next Steps...

Rick continues to refine the instructions to be clear around what is expected. By providing better guidelines, Rick hopes to help students understand how to collaboratively write and edit one another's papers. Using what he has learned from developing the Illustration Survey wiki, Rick will create a fully online course for undergraduates called A History of Illustration.

You Can Create A Wiki Too!!

• Keep an eye our for our Wiki Workshops - http://www.lesley.edu/elis/programs.html
• Participate in a self-paced, online Wiki module in the eLearning Faculty Resource Center
• Contact eLIS@lesley.edu for special one-on-one training sessions