A new high-tech take on school group project

Israeli business school professor Sheizaf Rafaeli hated seeing his students shell out money for expensive, outdated textbooks. So he let them write one themselves.

He put up an old textbook he published about information systems on a wiki and required his class to make updates. By the end of the term, not only was his textbook more current and comprehensive, his students didn't pay a dime -- and those who updated frequently scored better on exams.

Rafaeli's book is an example of how wikis could change classrooms from the ground up, a topic at the Wikimania conference this weekend at Harvard Law School, where Rafaeli's work will be presented to wiki enthusiasts and academics from around the world.

``Students like the notion of knowledge being malleable, evolving, and actually living through their work," Rafaeli said. ``They discover to their surprise that at the end of the semester, the textbook is very different from what it was at the beginning."

Rafaeli added that wikis are useful for distance learning, because he teaches at the University of Haifa and students can't attend classes regularly during the ongoing conflict with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

A wiki -- the word means ``fast" in Hawaiian -- is a technology developed in the mid-1990s that lets readers edit and rewrite Web pages . There are private wikis, open to certain readers and editors, and public wikis. Then there are wikis in between, viewable by everyone but rewriteable only by a select few .

The technology is most commonly associated with Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by the public with nearly 2 million registered users . But it has broader uses, and educators are experimenting with wiki textbooks, wiki lesson plans that teachers share, and projects in which students develop wikis as they would write papers.

Kevin Driscoll , a computer science teacher at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Somerville, started a school wiki last year. It became a ``living yearbook" updated by more than 200 students. Athletes published game results, while others made it like a student newspaper.

Driscoll also created a private wiki for teachers. Unexpectedly, it became an invaluable tool for tracking whether school printers were working. He's also developing a wiki project called TeachForward.org that will let teachers write lesson plans collaboratively.

Other teachers use wikis instead of standard research papers. Computer science teacher Vicki Davis of Georgia replaced a 200-question exam with a wiki project. She said that students learned more because they had to synthesize, source, and edit content instead of memorize and that quality went up because students interacted .

She's found students updating the wikis near midnight and discussing changes on blogs.

``It becomes part of their lives," she said. ``Instead of MySpace and social networking, they are going on the wiki, talking about education."

However, in the socially cutthroat world of high school, wikis are not problem-free. A few students at Prospect have vandalized others' pages, as sometimes happens with Wikipedia. But the school traced edits back to the users for discipline, and Driscoll said he'll soon implement log-ins. Vandalism happens at higher levels, too. Because Rafaeli's textbook is open, automated Web crawlers occasionally rewrote it with spam or pornography.

But Rafaeli and Davis said they haven't had problems with vandalism from students because they are conscientious about what they publish.

Another problem with wikis could be grading, said Andrea Forte , a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology who will speak at Wikimania about education.

``When you have a radically collaborative tool like a wiki and take it into a high school where the standard for assessment is individual, you have a bit of culture conflict," she said.

Davis grades her students' wikis like essays, focusing on accuracy, critical thinking, and participation. She said it isn't harder than grading a classroom's worth of papers because she gets e-mail updates on the wiki and tallies student edits on a chart. Rafaeli grades solely on whether students make the required number of updates.

Forte said wikis would work best in higher education where knowledge is constantly changing. Instead of writing papers that are thrown away once graded, Forte said students could write wikis and contribute to the worldwide pool of knowledge.

``We're providing students an opportunity to have their voices heard," Forte said. ``This is the gold standard when it comes to motivation."

Kim-Mai Cutler can be reached at kcutler@globe.com.