From Faculty Academy 2007 Wiki
“Ready! Aim! Fire!”: Exploding the British Romantic Literature Canon with a Wiki Canonball
- Chriss Foss (English, Linguistics, and Speech, UMW)
My presentation will walk through how incorporating a variety of wiki assignments into my British Romantic Literature course (with tremendous help from Jim Groom, of course) transformed both the daily classroom and the course as a whole. In the previous iteration of the course I first introduced my Canonball Project assignment, for which students select the readings for one of the main units of the calendar. They each are responsible for a part of this calendar, and they present their selection(s) to the class and then write a paper on the text(s). With the wiki, students were required to post drafts of their presentation ahead of time. This allowed the rest of the class to have a print copy during the presentation. Also, a classmate was assigned as an official respondent; this classmate wrote a graded response that was posted to the wiki the period after the presentation. The presenter then was able to use this response in writing the final version of their essay on the text(s). The wiki also transformed this course in that students were required to take official notes twice during the semester and post them to the wiki. They also were required to write two responses to classmate notes. By the end of the semester, the wiki provided a repository of multiple perspectives and supplements about what happened during virtually every class meeting, potentially truly transforming the students’ understanding both of British Romantic Literature and of meaning-making itself as a collaborative process.
