A fellow grad student, Dave Elfving, and I will be presenting at the Teaching and Learning with Technology conference on March 2nd at Purdue University. The title is “When does a wiki work? A case study in graduate education” and we’ll be discussing our experience over the past year and a half of using a wiki in our department – focussing on the first semester where we used it extensively in one class and hardly at all in another. It’s part of Dave’s thesis and more of a side project for me, but one I’ve been interested in for some time. It’s nice to work on something a bit different than my thesis, keeps the gears turning. We’ll have a few video clips of people talking about the wiki & we’ll post everything online afterward.

I suggested using a wiki on the first day of class (even then I was thinking it would be an interesting case) and it went from there. As time went on several broader questions emerged.

• What is the place of collaborative writing in graduate education & academia?
• Why do people contribute, and in what way do the do so?
• What is the pedagogical value?

Hopefully we’ll have a good discussion.