Thursday, April 7, 2011

Creating my own grammar wiki

I wanted to find a wiki resource on grammar as this is what students seem to have the most trouble with and since wikis are (at least in theory) done by “ordinary people” it will help students feel confident that they do not need to be an expert on this topic. However, I completely failed to find anything of the sort. Almost any search for grammar+wiki, punctuation+wiki, or pretty much anything else +wiki is immediately over-saturated by links to wikipedia. So, I went to wikipedia to see if it would work, or if it had any links to other resources. No luck. It was very heavy on theory and light on practice, which is exactly what student's DON'T need when it comes to grammar. I also found a site called grammar wiki (http://grammarwiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page) which sounded promising. But, sadly, the site is pretty much an empty shell. It doesn't even have a page on subject verb agreement. I think the best plan would be to build a grammar wiki myself, or, even better, have the students build it. One of my classes already has assignments where each student has to teach a grammar concept to the class including examples of the principle in action and methods for fixing mistakes. Students could just post these in a wiki instead of (or in addition to) on the discussion board and gradually add to it each semester. The advantage this has over using a pre-built wiki is that students would get to feel they're doing some thing “real,” they're making a change in the world because their work will remain on the web and be useful to other students in future semesters or even at other schools. Really, I wouldn't even have to bother to build my own shell for this either. I'd have to poke around it a little more but, probably, my students and I could work to expend the existing, but mostly empty grammar wiki. The act of editing a wiki forces the students to own their subject and take the role of an authority which I find is very useful in the long run as one of the biggest difficulties in composition is that many students come in believing they can't do it. Taking the expert role usually makes them uncomfortable at first but, if they stick with it, they get a major boost in their confidence (and writing abilities) by the end of the semester.

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