Related Pages

Creativity in the law curriculum

The ‘creativity in the law curriculum’ stream at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2007 included the following papers: Class acts: script and performance in l...

Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008: (Dis)integration...designs on the law curriculum

Papers on integration at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008: Towards true integration: can we improve the English law degree? – Kevin Kerrigan and Philip Plo...

Peer mentoring for international students

In her paper Shamini Ragavan (Newcastle University) described her experiences as an international student tutor, exploring in particular the role of collaborative le...

Postgraduate to professional: creativity and opinion writing skills

In her paper presented at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2007 Ros Carne, Opinion Writing Co-ordinator at City Law School, described the grid used to help students...

Tuning in not zoning out: teaching students legal skills via a multimedia learning hub

contributors | abstract | presentation | biographies Contributors Sanmeet Kaur and Emily Allbon (City University) Format Paper presentation. Abstract Law has ...

Comments

There are no comments at this time

Tagged

collaborative learning

legal skills

wikis

Home » Resources » Enhancing learning through technology » Wikis: a tool for distributive writing

Wikis: a tool for distributive writing

Advice on the use of wikis in legal education by Paul Maharg (Glasgow Graduate School of Law), including an overview of the benefits of using wikis, what you need to get started, a tip sheet including two sample wiki tasks, pointers as to what to watch out for, examples, tips and ideas, and further reading,

This resource was produced for the UKCLE seminar on collaborative and distributive learning held on 1 November 2007 – view Paul’s presentation on wikis from the day at the foot of this page.

A wiki is an application that allows users to draft and redraft each other’s text online, and to share that text among a community of readers, either privately or publicly. It is an example of what has become known as ‘social software’ – other examples include blogs and applications such as Slideshare, MySpace, Facebook, and the like, where users interact and share data. Wikis have a specific function, though. Where a blog tends to focus on a set of entries written in chronological order like a journal, a wiki is a powerful collaborative drafting tool. It can enable people to work on projects as vast as an online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, or as small as a to do list for a camping trip.

Wikis can be used in many ways in legal education. At any point in your subject or module where you think you might want students to construct a knowledge base, or to collaborate with each other over the Web, then a wiki is an ideal tool. You might want students to work on a collaborative drafting project in a module on constitutional law, for instance, or to draft a contract collaboratively, or to develop a knowledge base for a particular audience. Wikis can thus be used for formative feedback, where tutors can give feedback on work in draft form. They can also be used for summative assessment, where the final product is submitted for high-stakes assessment. Wikis can also be used by teachers for more instructional uses, where short articles or comments are generated by a teacher and made available for a class. Such resources may be used as background reading to lectures, tutorials, workshops, student activities, etc.

Wikis are flexible applications, too. They can be used in conjunction with blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication), to add a collaborative drafting space to the more finished products of blogs and RSS. You can embed video in a wiki, as well as graphics and diagrams. They can also be used as part of an e-portfolio, where working drafts can be made public to viewers on the portfolio, or kept private, as appropriate. They can be used for staff research purposes, too – see for instance the Transforming legal education wiki.

While you may need help in setting up the software for users (depending on the type of wiki you use), wikis are quite intuitive to use. If your students can use web editors such as you find in Hotmail, they will be able to use wikis reasonably quickly after a ‘sandbox ‘activity to show them the basic tools.

Wikis generally fall into three types:

  • hosted wikis, such as Socialtext – often commercial, with passworded environments, levels of functionality, etc
  • server-side wikis, such as the free software MediaWiki
  • desktop applications such as Instiki – free, sit on your desktop, but not Web-enabled

Used as educational tools, wikis have the potential to:

  • create networks of meaning
  • enable distributed learning across the Internet
  • facilitate collaborative learning

Like other forms of social software such as blogs, wikis move us away from the view of learning and teaching dominated by organisations that are silos of information, from products such as handbooks, from lock-step instruction and from snapshot assessment of taught content. Instead, wikis can enable resource-based learning with much more open access, and a focus not on static content but on Web-based aggregated content. They can embody e-learning as understanding and conversation, as just-in-time learning, and assessment of situated learning.

Benefits

Why would you want to use a wiki for learning and teaching? Some basic purposes:

  1. Users and can draft and redraft each others’ texts, and teachers will have a record of that activity.
  2. Collaborative projects are easy to participate in, with an online tool that holds a central version of the project, abolishes the problems of version control…
  3. Teaching materials can be hosted on a wiki and revised easily.
  4. Teams of students can work on a document, as well as individuals.
  5. Projects can be as small as several paragraphs or as large as a book – even one as large as an encyclopaedia…
  6. Student-centred drafting area.
  7. Staff can use tools to comment on student work.

More generally, you can use a wiki to:

What you need

The software! Which you can get for free at the various sites mentioned above. You may need to ask IT support to help you with the download, particularly if there are server-side issues you need to deal with.

Next you’ll need experience. If you’ve used Web text editors, for instance when e-mailing with Hotmail, you’ll find wikis are pretty intuitive. But it does take a few trial sessions before you’re ready to launch out on your own or with others. Increasingly, learning management systems such as Blackboard or WebCT have their own versions you can play about with. The latest version of MS SharePoint has a wiki too.

In the process of playing with the software you’ll almost inevitably begin to think about how you could use it with students. The examples given here are only starting points – we’ve really only begun to think about how to use this tool. The interesting thing about it is that it allows collaborative and distributive writing, as well as providing a practical project environment, which many law teachers will find a welcome tool in the teaching of legal writing skills – both undergraduate academic writing skills and postgraduate professional writing.

‘How to’ tip sheet

Below are two activities as examples of how you might go about setting up a wiki task. The first is fairly directive and looks lock-step, but of course needn’t be – most tasks can be carried out in overlap with others. The second is more of a description of how one might move from a pre-existing task to a new version hosted on a wiki.

Case study 1: undergraduate legal writing module

  1. Set task, for example collaborative writing of a judgment or Opinion.
  2. Write rules – who will write in the student body (individuals? groups?), what should be produced, to which audience, why, how much feedback will you give, who will give it, when and how. How will this link up with other assessment tasks, other modules?
  3. Set task in the context of a module, so it is aligned with other teaching interventions and other student activities.
  4. Write task and writing guidelines, resources, etiquette, etc. Set timelines for drafting.
  5. Embed guidelines and resources in the wiki environment as a page (for easy access).
  6. Write sandbox activity. Plan time for students to undertake the activity and practise for themselves how to edit text in a wiki.
  7. Test wiki access and links, both from within institutional networks and from a variety of machines outwith these networks (if possible).
  8. Run sandbox activity.
  9. Begin task.
  10. Monitor and give feedback.
  11. Wind up activity by counting down to deadline.

Case study 2: professional legal writing module

This is a description of an activity that will be designed during 2008-09, and arises from a client bulletin project that students already undertake on the Diploma in Legal Practice at Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL). The domain is professional legal writing skills.

Students are asked to write a number of client bulletins for clients of their virtual firms. They choose the area of legal activity that they think would be of interest to their clients, carry out update research, embed that research in forms of writing that draw in a clientele that is predominantly non-legal. For examples of student writing in the present learning environment, see the Ardcalloch Legal Information and Advice Service.

Note that students are posting up static Word documents that have been collaboratively drafted. They commented that it would have been better to be able to do that online, rather than pass drafts around by e-mail. We shall enable that to happen next year by using wiki software. We’ll follow most of the steps in the activity outlined above.

The wiki will solve many problems for us, which are not just those of collaborative drafting. Having centralised drafts are also useful for commentators who may be outside the university. We shall be inviting professional legal writers as guest lecturers onto this module to comment on student work and to give workshops in legal writing, using examples of student writing; and this can be done in GGSL on smartboards as well as at a distance on the wiki.

Examples, tips and ideas

Watch out for…

  1. Students do need to be shown how to edit in a wiki. A good start is Lee Lefever’s YouTube video – Wikis in plain English – where a group of friends set up a wiki as a to do list for a camping trip. Next, give students a ‘sandbox’ page they can edit and play around with for a couple of days, to gain confidence in using the tools.
  2. Lack of ground rules, set rules, as you would, for example, in blog etiquette.
  3. As in blog writing (or indeed any collaborative activity), some students may come to dominate the wiki writing process. Deal with this off-page, or use that dominance as a lever to draw others into the writing process.
  4. You may want to set rules about the sort of writing you think students should be producing. In other words you might want to give them models that help to scaffold their writing. Information on topics such as neutral points of view, editing each others’ work, roles as text generators and text finishers is useful, too.
  5. Time. Give students a strong sense of deadlines, possibly counting down, so that the editing process isn’t perceived as endless (and therefore inevitably is rushed in the last few days before the deadline). But remember to give students sufficient time to carry out the task you want them to do online.

Paul’s presentation
Wiki – a tool for distributive writing

Further reading

Last Modified: 4 June 2010

©UKCLE 2000-2010 UK Centre for Legal Education