Most educators agree that student collaboration and peer learning are valuable pedagogical strategies, yet such projects are often a source of frustration. Students have conflicting schedules and personalities. Tracking and assessing individual contributions presents another problem. Collaborative online technologies like wikis and blogs offer a way to overcome these issues.

Wikis are especially useful for writing instruction. A dynamic and comfortable forum in which students can communicate with each other, wikis offer opportunities for improving student writing through modeling, collaboration, and revision. Indeed, using wikis in writing instruction aligns with the stated outcomes of the First Year Writing program. For example, collaborative wiki projects can assist in teaching students how to "locate [their] argument in a broader conversation" and to "define, address, and appeal to [their] target audience." These tools can also enhance peer review skills, another student learning outcome that appears on the syllabi of many writing courses. Further, wikis help students think about writing as process, and they give students a sense of purpose. Because their work is semi-public, students feel more accountable for its quality. Finally, their collaborative nature encourages classroom community and develops their sense of civic engagement.

....[a] concern that students have with collaborative work is that their individual contributions will not be appropriately noticed or assessed...

Despite these and other obvious benefits, the potential of opensource, collaborative technologies to reshape writing pedagogies has not yet found its outlet in many writing classrooms. One reason for this notable absence is the fear that the technology is too difficult to learn or that it will require more time and effort than it is worth. Another common concern is how to deal with students’ anxiety about making their writing public and their concern with appropriate assessment of collaborative work. With planning and training, however, instructors and students can learn to navigate this rather straightforward tool and to identify strategies that complement their teaching style and meet their pedagogical goals.

Because their work is semi-public, students feel more accountable for its quality.

I first decided to explore wiki writing as part of my English 101 class. In conjunction with the First Year Writing Program’s emphasis on civic engagement, the course theme that I developed was "The Public I." To accommodate this theme, I wanted to find a way to demonstrate the ways in which writing could be a public process and product, as well as to encourage group learning. The wiki, then, was an ideal tool for me. In other 101 classes, I had taught rhetorical analysis in a series of journals. This time, I designed a collaborative essay project in which students taught each other the terms and strategies of rhetorical analysis and worked together to analyze a text.

Communicating via the wiki discussion feature, students began the project by selecting a pair of political speeches that their group wished to analyze and compare. Their second task was to post to the wiki individual responses to the speeches; thus, the initial invention stage of composition encouraged individual reflection. Because their first shared writing was in the form of a low-stakes task, this method also mitigated some of the stress of exposing their writing to the public eye. Another concern that students have with collaborative work is that their individual contributions will not be appropriately noticed or assessed; this assignment helped allay some of those anxieties.

The next step in the process was for students to prepare a group presentation in which they presented their initial observations to the class as a whole and then solicited ideas and feedback from their peers. After receiving input from their peers during the group presentations, students revised their individual responses to the speeches. Often, students complain that work on discussion boards or other electronic spaces is simply busy work that doesn’t relate to the issues of the class. This presentation helped to bring into the classroom the work that went on outside of class in the space of the wiki, demonstrating its centrality to class activities. As with the initial wiki posting, the group presentation also reinforced the value of writing as a process and as a collective learning endeavor.

The final stage was composing a collaborative essay, to be assigned a  collective grade according to the First