Wiki Reader's Guide is the New Annotated Bib!

The first digital technology I ever used for collaborative writing in the FYC classroom was the wiki. From the beginning I was captivated by the ability to rapidly build pages that were capable of deep connectivity and cross-referencing. It wasn't long before I had the idea to adapt the annotated bibliography into the wiki format. Suddenly the annotated bid, which traditionally had the audience of a desk drawer, could be presented as a resource for current and future researchers. As digital publications, wikis can be tagged with keywords, making them relevant to internet search engines. 

This semester student teams designed wikis to exhibit their library research on specific issues within college education. Individuals focused on a specific issue about college education, completing a library database search for recent, peer-reviewed articles from academic journals. Every student collected 2-3 articles which were read and analyzed before building the wiki site. Each team collaborated on a homepage which introduced the context for their inquiry into college education while also introducing the individual page links that led to the article reviews. The team effort helped the class collaboratively identify, research, analyze, and write about specific issues in college education such as poverty in college, national curriculum, grade inflation, gender bias in the classroom, self-segregation on campus, and more. 

Of course the real substance of the wiki reader's guides can be found in the student's article reviews. Students created MLA-style bibliographic entries to accompany their rhetorical analysis, summary, and personal response to each source.

We analyzed other professional and community wikis to see how authors presented the links to various pages. Students then experimented with various strategies  for presenting the links to the article reviews.  One method was to create a page directory like the student example below:

Other student teams integrated the hyperlinks in the prose introduction as seen in the student example below. This strategy lends itself to building complex texts which reference and cross-reference webpages on the site or beyond. 

Perhaps the most creative strategy was to use an auxiliary text to set the context for the links. One student team used issue-relevant comic strips to introduce the links. This multimodal approach also creates the rich intertextual connections between academic, popular, and student authors.

Overall, the wiki reader's guide assignment appears to give students a purpose and location for recording their important analysis of library sources. The use of article databases allowed students to join an ongoing academic conversation while situating it in their own publications and student communities. One of my favorite moments in this assignment was when students held a roundtable to discuss the articles they read. Students spoke with authority and deep investment in particular issues in college education. I recommend this assignment to any writing teacher who wants students to find, analyze, and map secondary sources for a researched writing project.