This article is a mixed methods study in which the researchers collected data on peer-feedback and revision from a class wiki. The participants were elementary school ESL learners studying at a school in Hong Kong and their teachers. The classrooms were blended learning environments in which students could work on the wiki during class time or at home. The students were assigned two pieces of collaborative writing: a biography about someone famous and an information poster about personal hygiene. The researchers collected comments and studied the revision history of each article in order to find a correlation between peer feedback and revision. The researchers split comments and revisions into several categories. For comments, the categories were surface-level, content level, or group management/other. Revisions were similarly split into surface and content level changes. In addition, researchers collected qualitative data in the form of student and teacher interviews and grader assessment of the final writing products.
The researchers found that most comments in two of the classes were made on content-level concerns. Students also used the wikis to communicate in a social manner, much like users would in a chat. To correlate, most of the revisions made in the wikis were content-level changes. The researchers viewed the wiki as a useful medium in this regard, as content-level changes are indicative of higher levels of thinking. The study did not include a control group in which students completed the assignments without the use of a wiki, but they did have assignments completed from a previous year. The class evaluated the writing assignments created in the wiki as more effective than the ones created without.
The researchers use their mixed methods study and past scholarship in order to argue for the effectiveness of class wikis on improving L2 writing. Without a real control group, one could question whether the study was biased towards using wikipedia as a writing tool, however. The article briefly mentioned some of the problems that students encountered with the wiki (staying on task, for example). It would have been useful for some of these concerns and anxieties to be elaborated upon a little more so that other instructors could know what to expect. While the study focuses on very young students, it may be useful for instructors on any level who wish to learn more about what technologies are available for collaborative writing and peer revision. Using a class wiki could be valuable for collaborative writing in a classroom computer lab environment, such as the one featured in this study. Some writing-intensive courses at the college level, for example, take place in computer labs, which would be an environment that is very conducive for collaborative writing. Wikis could also provide a way for instructors to incorporate multimodal forms or writing.
I, too, would like the researchers to have elaborated on issues students encountered while using the wiki. Regarding time on task, I wonder whether the wiki or the assignment was the issue, or whether the fact that wikis are managed and composed on networked computers proved too tempting — elementary students (and all students, for that matter) often find the online environment distraction-prone. What would be interesting would be ways students might have been encouraged to take advantage of the affordances of a networked computer to include web-based content in the compositions. Can young students be encouraged to "wander" around the web seeking content while also being required to compose and provide reviews? I'm not sure of the answer, but one of the pedagogical challenges we face in networked computer writing "labs" is the distraction factor. Rather than allowing distractions to be, well, distracting, can we incorporate the distractions themselves into the learning environment?
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