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This paper describes best practices for using a collaborative web application known as a wiki to augment a traditional course management system.

y introducing a wiki for collaborative course management, students also learn to interact with a real world tool, enabling them to accomplish some tasks that would be more cumbersome if not impossible using a traditional course management system.

Wikis are useful for students to share their class notes (O’Neill, 2005; Guth, 2007). O’Neill proposes that “the instructor places skeletal lecture notes onto a wiki site, and students flesh them out with materials they have learned in class...” 

Maloney (2007) suggests that today’s course management systems are not being used to their fullest potential. Because they are “built around the … course, not the … student,”

“The role that the systems play most often is like that of an advanced photocopier

a next-generation CMS must be centered around the student’s learning, not the course’s administration

In one project, each group set up its own wiki page to chronicle work and share materials with other group members. A template provides the structure for students to enter their names and tasks completed.

To promote collaboration, two or three students are assigned specific dates throughout the semester to post their notes from class to the wiki. To ensure that they were posted in a timely fashion, students had to complete their wiki notes prior to the start of the following class. Classmates then reviewed these “Wikipedia-style” notes pages, and added information that they learned but the original authors may have omitted.

The instructor provided a template containing the class date, space for the contributors to enter their names, and a blank page below for the notes.

Outside of these areas, however, the benefits of 1:1 laptop availability are mixed. Different studies have found changes in math and science test performance that were inconsistent. In general, the authors argue, the benefits of laptops come in cases where the larger educational program has been redesigned to incorporate their unique capabilities,

unless the use of laptops is focused on providing a relevant portion of the lesson plan, they'll (obviously) wind up being irrelevant at best, and a distraction at worst

Of course, given their popularity with college students, laptops are showing up in classrooms where they have nothing to do with lesson plans at all.

That's the theory. The reality is that everything from IM chats to online shopping excursions take place over the in-class ether, distracting everyone involved:

What's to be done?

Our own Jacqui Cheng suggests a variation on this: make all laptop users sit in the back, so that they only distract each other, and let them figure out whether their grades are suffering on their own.