“‘I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was,’ recalled Ms. Walsh. ‘You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly.’”

-- Katherine Walsh, Wikipedia contributor to “Contrabassoon,”
New York Times, June 17, 2006

 

 

I taught two sections of first-year composition the spring semester of 2005. In the succeeding fall semester, 2005, I taught two more semesters of first-year composition.

All four courses incorporated wikis in the curriculum. In the spring of 2005, I created a writing experiment for the two composition courses using a Wikipedia film page, Memento, which serves as the basis for the assignment discussed in chapter two.

In the fall of 2005, two composition courses completed a project revising film pages for Wikipedia as well as writing another assignment for World66, a travel wiki.

I attempted to structure the two sections in the fall of 2005 using a traditional control group model, where one class would write in a CBPP environment, while the second class would write a roughly equivalent assignment in a traditional environment.

The purpose was to structure assignments so as to isolate the CBPP environment as the only factor accountable for differences between the outcomes in the control group and the experimental group.

I constructed a formal experiment to test my central question of whether or not CBPP can improve writing instruction.

If it does, by what measures would we know it?

I decided that I ought to at least attempt to measure fluency: how much students write for a CBPP assignment versus how much they write for a more traditional assignment.

Since I had two sections of first-year composition, I attempted to structure the courses so that one course served as a control group, writing a traditional essay, while the other course served as a an experimental group, writing in a CBPP environment.

In the final analysis, that fall 2005 experiment yielded a lot of good information which will serve to guide readers who seek to attempt a CBPP assignment.