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Class Reactions to the Short Short Story
This was our first attempt at online creative collaborative writing using wiki software. Team members did a great job on a snowy day from diverse online locations, in groups of 2 to 5, taking turns writing their assigned element of the story that extends the prior work of their teammates, with the goal of providing one sentence for each part of the story: (1) introduce protagonist (hero) in some setting; (2) create a catastrophe; (3) introduce antagonist (thorn in side of hero); (4) continue the catastrophe; and (5) resolve or end the story. Following this experience, the participants put their "teacher hats" on and wrote brief reflections on educational implications in Word, pasted them into a Centra chat screen, which was then copied into the wiki page essay below. Click the sec02 Computers in Education folder in the Navigation column on the left of this page to read the short story experiments; see also the links to the chapter and session if you were absent. You were part of a history making event, part of the first set of students at WCU to use our new wiki server software. This was also the first day that your instructor has used this software software design for teaching. For most of you, it was also the first time you have tried collaborative writing activity. You did well in following the conceptual spirit of teamwork as expressed by Katzenbach and Johnson and Johnson. My special thanks to Neil Torda from the IT division who responded quickly to my request for wiki software that would allow differents levels of control in who has permission to edit, finding and installing the open source Plone software on our OS10 server and finding time to teach me the basic Plone features that extend the wiki concept.
Reflections on the Wiki Way Short Story Exercise
Noelle Kitchen:
I believe this activity would be much easier if there was a visual with directions on it. It may be hard for students to remember which sentence went with which part of the story. Over all, I think this was a very enjoyable activity with a lot of helpful writing skills involved. Students have to brainstorm each time a new sentence is written, and they have to write their ideas into the story as well. It also helps students learn to work together in groups.
Courtney Walker:
I found it interesting to see how well others were able to build off of another person’s idea(s). As I read some of the other stories I found the ideas that others came up with very interesting. I was curious as to what spawned each group’s ideas. I think that this was fun. I liked being able to write and not have to be as concerned with grammatical issues as I normally would be.
-Courtney W.
Kelley Haney: This would be a really good tool to use in the elementary education level, or any education level for that matter. This would be a motivating tool to get students interested in the writing process. It teaches students to work together and allows them to be creative through their interaction with others. Students could see the writing process as it happens, whether they are at school or at home.
~Kelley Haney
Peggy Altman: I liked the anticipation of what the other peeps were going to add to the story. I think I it would be great fun to have students type a story. In my class, the students have written their own science fiction stories but I think something like collaborative writing, like the one we just did, would have made the assignment more fun for the students. I think they would get a kick out of seeing the different turns that the story takes… they would get a chance to build of each other’s creativity.
Amy Rouse: A very interesting story can be started just by having a few people giving some main ideas. Next comes the elaboration… Anyone can go in and elaborate or give more detail to make the story more interesting. People can edit others remarks so the story will make more sense. Eventually you could even make a class movie, or have a play! What fun!
Anna Kamphaus: I think the short story compilation is a good idea for any level. It’s something I’ve used before to build teamwork skills. In this situation I like that everyone is forced to work independently and must make some contribution to the group before the next person can continue. It combats the issue of one person doing all the work that seems to arise so often. This could be used with math, except I would ask students to write something relating to math, maybe a story where they have to use the numbers 1-10, using each number in order, one number per sentence.
Gina Billingsley: I think that this is would be an interesting concept for a writing project, especially for team members to brainstorm. I am not sure how I would utilize this in a math classroom, except for possible having each student do a step in a problem or if a student was having difficulty figuring out the next step on a problem and then allow the initial student to continue without more assistance if possible.
Hailey Caldwell: I really like the idea of using this program within a classroom because it gave the students to write creatively and add little pieces of them into the story. The only thing that I really didn’t like was the fact that you could only use 4 sentences. I had a lot more to say and I found myself having a hard time limiting it to just 4 sentences. Reading the other stories, it may not have been quite a problem for everyone else because the other groups did a good job of limiting themselves, but whenever I used this in a classroom I might tell my students that they could write as much as they wanted until they thought their group had finished their stories.
Bridgette Boley: This experience with the wiki sites has been fun. It has made me just a little more comfortable in taking something that someone else has published and changing it. Since we have been using this I have thought a lot about how I could use it later in my own classrooms. It could possibly be a good project aid to help my students learn how to effectively prove theorems that I may give them in class. I could start them with a theorem and require them to make changes to the problem and eventually prove it themselves. It would require a lot of supervision by me to make sure that one person is not doing all of the work, but it could still be very useful.