by Dan Weinstein
Associate Professor of English
College of Arts and Sciences
Dakota State University
Madison, South Dakota, USA
For a project wiki page, I generally use Google Sites which are wiki-style web sites hosted by Google. I set up a site for a class. Each student gets his or her own project page, but all project pages are visible to all students in the class. Students work in view of each other. Students can leave comments on each other's pages, and I sometimes require that they do so. The same can be done with Google Docs, but the wiki format makes it easier for everyone to see each other's pages.
The project page in this example is for a research paper in ENGL 201 (Advanced Composition). The project takes seven weeks. The work to be done is broken down into weekly assignments. As a rule I check and comment on project pages once a week. I check and comment on project pages more often if studens ask me to, or if they are late in finishing a particular week's work.
All the resources for the assignment are built in to the structure of, or linked to, the project page.
The "work log" is simply a discussion topic dedicated to the progress reports of a single student for a given project. Here again students work transparently, in view of each other, able to comment on each other's progress, ask questions of each other, and share resources.
The practice of "narrating your work", as implemented in this work log format, is intended to help students feel less isolated by fostering "ambient intimacy", the sense that other students are working away at the project as well, and that their assistance is just an update away.
Sometimes it helps to give students writing prompts for their progress reports, such as, "Simply describe what you did when you worked on your project today," or, "Describe a difficulty you have encountered while working on your project, and explain your plan for resolving it."
This page was last updated on 24 March 2011.