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Joyce Winslow
jwins@uoregon.edu

In the parlance of wikis, “sticky” is a good thing. It means you’ve created something that people want to return to again and again.

This summer, Mark Blaine’s experimental introduction of wikis into his graduate reporting and information strategies class definitely met the sticky criterion. It’s an experiment he plans to repeat, and wikis are now an integral part of his curriculum plan.

Wikis are relatively new to the e-communications scene, but as the populist Internet revolution continues they are becoming more ubiquitous. Essentially, a wiki is a collaborative web space, a site where any number of people may contribute and/or edit content without having to know anything about HTML, php, or other web page-creating code. All they need is typing ability and a web browser.

As communication and publication are a journalist’s stock in trade, requiring journalism students to use a wiki seems only natural. However, Blaine’s leap from wiki inspiration to wiki realization took many months of pondering, planning, and testing.

Last spring, after several months of considering ways to enliven the curriculum, Blaine attended a UO Teaching Effectiveness Program workshop on redesigning courses for hybrid learning. The workshop sparked ideas about how he might use new web tools in his classes, and he began discussing this possibility with the journalism school’s coordinator of instructional technology, André Chinn.

Coincidentally, Chinn, who is always on the lookout for “the right tools” to assist faculty in the classroom, had recently begun testing wikis himself. “People plus software,” muses Chinn, “…it’s like a relationship: you either click, or not.”

What ultimately clicked for Blaine and Chinn was DokuWiki, a simple software product that had the dual virtues of being free and easily modified. Chinn and his tech support team installed DokuWiki on their departmental server and, with Blaine’s input, began tweaking the product to suit their needs. The end result was “Tabula Rasa,” a dedicated site where students could log in with their School of Journalism ID and password to post material to the “Eugene Reporter’s Map” (http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/tr/doku.php?id=erm:reporters_map).The first-ever School of Journalism wiki was born.

On both the first and last day of class, Blaine gave his students the same assignment: draw a map of Eugene. As many of those in the class were from out of town, the gaps in their knowledge were quickly revealed. “I tried to use their lack of knowledge about Eugene as a tool to get them out the door and learning about the community. One of the first things a reporter has to do is learn to get around town and learn where things are and generally assess the lay of the land. I hoped to have them draw maps at the beginning that were bare bones and imperfect…By the end, I wanted to physically see how much more about the town they knew and felt comfortable rendering on a map. They did that and it ended up being a fun exercise. It really gives you (and them) a window into what they care about and where they come from.”

The map theme was carried over into the online Eugene Reporter’s Map, where neighborhood teams of student reporters regularly posted stories and photos from their assigned news beats (north Eugene, south Eugene, west Eugene, downtown and campus, and Springfield). In addition to filing their news stories online, students were also required to make contributions to their own professional eportfolios throughout the term. Along with clips, photos, and résumés, these eportfolios comprised student biographies, story ideas, and personal reading lists (research material for stories as well as what they read for fun and inspiration).

The open, fluid wiki format made it possible for students and instructor alike to become more thoroughly acquainted with each others’ work than would otherwise have been possible. As a consequence, class discussions and editorial commentary were far more substantive and engaging. On their own initiative, students added a blog to the site to keep the flow of ideas going.

Having to publish their writing online for the world to see gave students the added real-world pressure of taking responsibility for their work. In other ways, too, the wiki exercise contributed to students’ preparedness for a journalistic career in the 21st century. Today’s journalists are often expected to be familiar with multimedia technology, shooting their own photos and video as well as writing copy and posting to blogs. Even if their job doesn’t require such broad expertise, having basic familiarity with all the current forms of communication is a plus.

Another plus for students was having a polished eportfolio at the end of the term—a portfolio that is potentially portable and may be shown to prospective employers. The classroom eportfolio, Blaine explains, has “an inside face and an outside face.” The inside face, which contains information more pertinent to their coursework, aids the instructor in evaluating students’ work. The outside face aids employers in evaluating employment potential.

This fall, students enrolled in Blaine’s Magazine Article II class will also enjoy the benefits of using a wiki. Does Blaine plan to do anything differently next time? The biggest change will be a tighter structure. “I think the summer class was too loose, but I also was unsure what students would respond to in this environment. I now know where to apply pressure and how to measure better,” he says.

Blaine credits André Chinn’s technical assistance with the success of the wiki’s classroom debut. “I wouldn’t know what a wiki was without André,” he says. “It’s been a fun collaboration, but it wouldn’t have gone anywhere without his support (and Ryan Stasel and the other IT folks). I think there’s a lot there to inform other applications of open-source and wiki technology—big ideas are one thing, but without the talented on-the-ground, available people to troubleshoot them and brainstorm anticipated issues, it’s going to be more frustrating than useful…We’ve got a little community of hallway talkers—it’s part of what I imagined a university job to be like, that community of problem solvers.”