Student wiki notes – additional guidelines

The Student Wiki Pages experiment I described previously is going very well so far, with students collaboratively producing notes of (mostly) very high quality and using the comment facility to discuss issues that come up in the lecture and their readings.

However, I have had a few emails over the past days from students concerned about various aspects of the assessment. These do not apply to all the seminar groups, but in order to ensure consistency, I provided some additional guidelines for all students as outlined below.

The wiki pages will never be complete, so the argument that people before you have written “everything” does not stand. You can contribute 1) notes from the lecture, 2) notes from the readings, 3) notes or observations on the videos from the lecture, 4) additional examples illustrating points from lecture or readings, 5) post comments discussing or reflecting upon the wiki page contents.

However, the wiki pages are NOT designed to be a competition! They are intended to be a collaborative process. To this end, you may want to contribute your notes in batches, so as to allow other people to add their own notes (but this is entirely up to you and there are no formal restrictions concerning this). It is your collective responsibility to ensure that everyone feels able to do so and that you all engage in dialogue with fellow students. If concerns remain about how to best do this, please discuss in your seminar group and agree on how to best tackle it.

You are marked on the quality of your content as well as the extent to which you are able to collectively work to produce the notes. That means a page written by a large number of contributors will likely score higher than one written by only one or two contributors, provided the content is of a similar standard. Hint: this is a unit on communication skills, use them!

If you are editing the wiki simultaneously, the tool may generate a new page with your modification or text. There is no way around this at the moment, other than to manually move your content across to the main page for that week (I’m trying to find a fix). Please make sure you do so if you are having conflict issues like this, though I will look at all pages submitted for each week when marking. To this end, could you all please ensure the pages have a common naming structure (e.g. Week 11, Week 12 A, Week 12 B, Week 13… or whatever you have decided upon)?

I can assist with technical issues of not having the correct permissions, but if you are having technical difficulties beyond this, please contact IT helpdesk who should be able to help.

So far it appears this resolved most people’s concerns (judging by comments posted on wiki pages), though I’ll know for certain come Monday’s lecture…