Collaborative Narrative in the Classroom: Wikis

Of our three collaborative tools, this might be the least daunting to interface with an existing Canvas course: you can do this within the Canvas course shell itself by allowing students to alter Content pages. Simply change the edit privileges to "Teachers and Students"--

The advantage that wikis have over blogs or podcasts is the ability to track group member contributions. In Canvas, instructors can view the history of each page in the course, with each change attached to a user name. Other wiki platforms allow for more anonymity, so investigating those can perhaps encourage a more cohesive group product; personally, I prefer knowing who did what so as to avoid the potential pitfall in one student carrying the load.

Wikis are perhaps the most useful took for user-generated content sharing. In a literature or composition classroom, they can--

• Develop rigorous research practices
• Promote collaborative learning through diplomatically navigating shared document creation, if group cohesion is encouraged (Mimi & Wei 2017)
• Track development toward learning outcomes for the group or class, especially as information and content is corrected and developed over time
• Give students valuable experience in navigating online textual communities
• Encourage students to write content for a real, public audience

Wikis have potential both for small groups, in which case you can post Pages directly into Groups on Canvas, and for full-class products. Each will require its own assignment parameters and support (Lin & Reigeluth 2016), but enjoy the same benefits of collaborative online text production.

Tools

While using Canvas content pages is the most integrated and supported for our purposes, here are other wiki sites students might be familiar with:

• Wikipedia, of course--though this can be daunting due to the potentially large readership
• Wikispaces.com, which can be confined to your classroom readership
• The Google Docs integration with Canvas will allow your students to create shared documents that are more narrowly viewable

How to use in a classroom: 

Make use of the Instructure guides! There are separate screenshot walkthroughs for each stage of the process, and I'd start with the basic student introduction to the concept of Pages. Canvas also has a robust user community, and if you and/or your students are stuck I recommend pointing them to one of the many video tutorials on YouTube.

Additional reading: 

• Laflen, A. (2013). Putting wikis to work in the literature classroom. Modern Language Studies 43(1), 54-73.
• Lin, C., & Reigeluth, C. (2016). Scaffolding wiki-supported collaborative learning for small-group projects and whole-class collaborative knowledge building. Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning, 32(6), 529-547. 
• Mimi, L., & Wei, Z. (2017). Good or bad collaborative wiki writing: Exploring links between group interactions and writing products. Journal Of Second Language Writing, 3538-53.