Many in the academic world cast suspicious glares on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that users edit at will.

But some Ohio State professors have embraced the technology and philosophy of the wiki. CarmenWiki, a university-sponsored wiki project, aims to make wikis a common classroom tool.

CarmenWiki is a Web site where users develop their own pages to work on class work or group projects. Users can easily edit and comment on each others’ pages.

CarmenWiki is in “extended beta” mode, said Valerie Rake, system developer and engineer at OSU. This means that it is no longer a pilot project, but that it is not quite ready to be incorporated university-wide and has not been officially announced.

Rake said the next step was scaling the project, which began about three years ago, to OSU’s size, and being able to offer support for all potential users. For now, she is a one-woman help desk.
Rake said CarmenWiki would be open to the entire university by summer.

In addition to coursework, CarmenWiki is also used for departmental projects, meeting minutes, various administrative functions and research projects.

The Digital Union will host an event on the many ways wikis are being used at OSU Feb. 11.

So far, 119 different people have requested spaces on CarmenWiki. Rake said some professors use the same space quarter after quarter, and their wiki becomes a “cumulative knowledge base.” Others request new spaces every quarter.

Richard Selfe, director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, used CarmenWiki for an advanced writing course for students about to embark on an internship.

“I probably got more pure writing out of people in this class than I have in a lot of writing classes that I’ve taught that don’t use technology,” Selfe said.

Class members researched the careers that they wanted to pursue and created wiki spaces showcasing them.

Amanda Ross, a second-year in fashion and retail studies, devoted her page to fashion editing. Her site included images and interviews with professionals in the field.

“The professionals I interviewed for the class are impressed with my work and portrayal of them,” she said.

While one of the features of CarmenWiki is the ability to set controls on who can read content, Selfe said he wanted to make the students’ pages public.

Many instructors think that “if students know their work is going to be potentially read by anybody in the world, as opposed to just their professor, they’re going to get a little better quality,” Rake said.
In late 2007, Learning Technology services began looking at implementing a university-sponsored wiki service.

“By that time Carmen was looking pretty stable and we were thinking, ‘what else does campus seem to need?’ What other online learning resource might be useful?'” Rake said.

CarmenWiki is built on Confluence, an open-source wiki software distributed by Atlassian. Rake said they had to make few changes to the existing software.

Because it has not been officially announced, Rake said it has mostly been promoted by word of mouth.

Karen MacBeth and Ivan Stefano teach a research writing course for students with English as a second language. They began using CarmenWiki in the fall. Since then it has become integral to the course, MacBeth said.

For the international students who constitute the class, the wiki can be a valuable resource when working on term papers, Stefano said.
“They go to the wiki. It’s very accessible. It’s something they’re familiar with. The language is to their level,” he said.

Selfe said one of the benefits of using CarmenWiki in his classes is that it prepares students for a new, digital world.

“We focus on the basics of writing, but we know that people are going to have to work in digital environments and that they’re going to have to work in many modalities.”

Selfe said while wiki use in classrooms was helpful, technology was not a “silver bullet”.

“You introduce something like a wiki and all of a sudden there’s this constellation of other stuff … what happens often is it just makes things pretty complicated,” he said.

MacBeth and Stefano mentioned the lack of a guidebook for instructors.

“Sometimes a student will have questions and the teacher won’t have the answer,” MacBeth said.

Despite the kinks still to be worked out, Stefano said he thought the benefits outweighed the limitations.

Rake said predicting how wikis will be used in the future is difficult, although she would like to see them become another common tool at instructors’ disposal.

“The thought of a single tool providing every need? No way,” she said. “There are a variety of tools and our ability to move among them will make them seem seamless.”

For more information about CarmenWiki visit carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/wikipilot/CarmenWiki+Help.