What would a composition teacher who never used a wiki, and wanted to try it, need to know?  The purpose of this chapter is to answer that question by providing a practical plan for involving wiki writing in the composition classroom.

For teachers at the college level whose practice lies beyond the composition classroom, the last section of this chapter will specifically address the concerns of involving wiki writing in other areas of college curriculum.

As this plan for integrating wiki writing in the classroom progresses, it will explicitly connect back to the principles of good composition practices – as enumerated by the Committee on College Composition and Communication, The National Council of Teachers of English, as well as the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

But equally importantly, this plan of action will expand those accepted composition principles by intermingling them with concepts already enumerated in this text, including

Laziness, or maximizing student autonomy (and thus capability) by allowing them to select projects and/or topics based on their interests;

Commons-Based Peer Production, or maximizing the value added to collaborative projects through individual creativity and allowing the writing teacher to assume the role of writing “coach”;

Authenticity, which seeks to involve students in projects with audiences beyond the academic classroom;

Professional Standards, by asking students to produce work both relevant to the overall project and credible in terms of ethos – with a reasoned voice and a sense of  the values of that knowledge community;

Epistemology, by asking students to understand the accepted knowledge making procedures for their project’s community, and, if necessary, to reevaluate and/or defend their contributions, when challenged, by the stated acceptable practices of that knowledge community.

Transition, or moving the student from a position of being a consumer of general knowledge to the position of being a producer of specific, authoritative knowledge.