Collaborative Reflection on The Cultural Politics of Sport
From wsuwiki
Fall 2005
In the new course, Cultural Politics of Sport, WSU students are encouraged to participate in higher and higher levels of engaged writing, leading to collaborative article writing in Wikipedia. In this process, students explore a topic area, build a collaborative annotated bibliography, identify key terms and concepts missing from Wikipeda, practice article writing and editing, and then, finally, develop and submit new articles to Wikipedia. All the preliminary work is done in the WSU Wiki, which provides a safe area to develop ideas and skills before entering Wikipedia.
With first semester’s pilot of the Cultural Politics of Sport nearing completion, now is a good time to start discussing our experiences with this course and its effect on learning; we'd like to gather all perspectives: students, faculty, and other WSU folks.
Using the wiki, we can experiment in a collaborative reflection, which (if we are lucky) may prove a very messy process. Below is the start of reflection on The Cultural Politics of Sport. By doing this publicly, on the WSU Wiki, we invite others — students, faculty, staff, T.A.s, and instructional designers — to participate and enrich the reflection. Improve the story by adding your personal reflections and experience. (Please use the discussion page for discussing edits, controversy, and even reflection on this reflection process itself.)
Contents |
Background
The design of Cultural Politics of Sport is influenced greatly by the program outcomes assessment work done with the Comparative Ethnic Studies Program (CES) over the past year and a half, starting in early 2004.
This process began with faculty collaborating on the identification of essential learning outcomes. A rubric was then fashioned which detailed specific criteria for each outcome. This rubric was further refined by faculty and T.A.s in collaborative rating of student work across the curriculum. Faculty used data from these rating sessions to reflect on and improve their courses. This promotes alignment and integration of courses within the curriculum, clearer and more public articulation of the criteria for quality, and a means to continual improvement in the program.
The program rubric defines criteria for each outcome within a scale that spans from “disengaged” to “emerging” to “developing” to “engaged”. Engagement is highly valued by CES faculty. The rubric is refined through successive rating sessions. One of the initial rating sessions provided data which led faculty to two plans: 1) Faculty would apply the rubric to specific activities in their courses to find out the extent to which the activities promote programmatic learning outcomes; and 2) In response to a low scores for student research skills, CES faculty decided to design a research project for majors that would span the curriculum.
This preliminary work helped to focus the design of The Cultural Politics of Sport; program learning outcomes, engagement, and research across the curriculum were central to the design.
This pilot has at least two (and proably more) aspects to it: one is the pilot effort to integrate the program outcomes into course assignments (as described above) and the second was to employ a technology that best supports the context through which this particular course addresses those outcomes. The program's emphasis on engagment made a tool as public and collaborative as a wiki the most obvious and logical choice. This report focusses most specifically on the latter aspect though of course it cannot and does not entirely divorce itself from the former. More information about outcomes will be added as the department completes that process.
WSU Wiki
The WSU Wiki is editable by anyone in the university with a network id and password. The wiki environment provides an opportunity for interdisciplinary faculty and student collaborations beyond the traditional constraints of the course and program. For example, wiki pages are not closed and archived each semester. This allows for ongoing refinement of pages by students and faculty independent of their connection to a specific course, a process consistent with CES’s goals of engagement and research across the curriculum. This aspect of the wiki also has implications for the design of course pages. For example, should we directly identify a course's wiki pages by its traditional course and section numbers? What effect would that have on the broader interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations we hope for? To support open and ongoing development of work in the wiki, we decided to identify the class's wiki pages as "The Cultural Politics of Sport" instead of “CES 308”. The Cultural Politics of Sport is something historians, sociologists, political scientists, and regular sports fans, to name a few, can contribute to and enrich. CES 308, in contrast, has the effect of making the conversation more exclusive and inserts, unnecessarily, the silo structure of the university.
Design
Activities in the Course
Annotated Bibliography
In the first assignment students create a collaborative annotated bibliography in the WSU Wiki. Guided by the program outcomes rubric, students first add resources with annotations. They then give feedback to one another and revise one another’s annotations making specific reference to the evaluation criteria. Feedback and discussion of changes are made in the wiki discussion page. In this way students have an opportunity to identify topics of interest for future writing. They also create a resource to be used in later work and, since this course does not “close” at the end of the semester, a resource for future classes. The bibliography is refined throughout the course and leads naturally to a point of synthesis in articles.
Instead of the instructor front loading readings, students investigate resources that interest them and then, depending on the path they decide to take, bring in other resources as they were needed. This assignment is a good means to assess research, information literacy, and Critical thinking skills.
Identification of Missing Terms in Wikipedia
In this activity students compile a list of terms that are missing or poorly developed in Wikipedia with definitions. Students conduct a search of Wikipedia to find out if important terms were present and, if present, how well they were developed. The intention is to surface gaps in Wikipedia and to identify new opportunities for writing. As with every other activity students are prompted to give feedback to one another and revise their definitions using the rubric.
Collaborative Article Editing
Next, groups of students begin to edit articles from Wikipedia. They do this by copying an article of interest from Wikipedia into the WSU Wiki and then improve it by adding references, checking facts, and building on existing text. This activity includes peer feedback and critical engagement in the discussion page using the rubric.
New Article Writing
In this activity groups of students write original articles intended for Wikipedia. Once again, this is a writing in the major course and the instructor is interested in engaged writing. Writing articles in Wikipedia provides a context in which students are writing for actual audiences and defending their writing in a public setting. This is in contrast to the traditional term paper or report written only for evaluation by the instructor. We have also discussed the possibility of CES students, faculty, and other WSU participants, compiling a programmatic text (a Wikibook) once a certain number of articles are developed and refined.
Reflective Practice
At different times throughout the semester, participants are asked to self assess. They do this by citing their writing in both wikis (Wikipedia and WSU Wiki) and then writing reflective summaries and assessing their work using the course rubric. In this reflection they are asked to identify evidence of learning outcomes, changes in understanding, new questions, and to assess the course activities. Peers then give feedback in the discussion page using the course rubric.
Editing and Writing Articles in Wikipedia
Finally students jump into wikipedia and begin posting edits and articles. Wikipedia provides a rich, diverse, community that engages students beyond the traditional narrow context of a classroom. Wikipedians are, in most cases, motivated by a sincere urge to write the best quality articles.
Pedagogical benefits
- Real resources produced through engagement with real audiences.
- Persuasion and defense of thought in a public setting.
- Ongoing engagement beyond the constraints of the class.
- A worldwide resource influenced by the work of students.
- Discussion and history pages offer a way to view the controversies, arguments, revisions, and thinking behind the article page. The article page provides a location for ongoing synthesis. This is in contrast to threaded discussions which have a tendency to disperse into multiple diverging threads.
What worked well
Ideas for improvement
- In the first week there should be explicit communication to students about the expectations for participation in the course.
- Students should be introduced more thoroughly to Wikipedia and to the concept -- and benefits -- of collaborative authoring. It should be clear from the beginning that one of the goals of the scaffolding is to lead to a high level of collaborative, engaged writing.
- Prompts for reflective activities to get at what students might want to get out of their experiences with the wiki and how that relates to the program & course goals should also help orient students to the process.
- Conduct an initial assessment of student familiarity with these types of activities, and then help fill in any gaps.
- Provide an initial activity to introduce students to using the rubric.
See also Students Contribute to Wikipedia