Wiki – SP Goes to the Movies

Wikispaces is a collaborative tool that allows people (more than one person at a time) to collaborate on writing projects such as papers, books,manuals, etc. Since collaboration is one of the pedagogical objectives of Smith College (and therefore our course) we have subsituted working together on a Wiki for one of the term papers. We have deleted a film from our viewing list, so instead of viewing a film and writing a five page paper, we will use the same amount of time (i.e., no extra work) to work together on our Wiki.

Basically, we are going to work together to write a book composed of student essays on sport psychology and films. Our methodology will be to first post one of our papers per film, and then have the rest of the class edit the paper: adding sections of their own papers, modifying sections they believe need modification, deleting unnecessary sections, and making spelling and grammar corrections.

We will each be expected to contribute five (5) “edits” per paper, that is three for each of the films. The steps involve: a) reading the posted paper; b) quickly reviewing your own paper; c) improving the posted paper by adding from your paper, or modifying the paper in some way (deleting, shortening, etc.). It is expected that this process should take from about 15-20 minutes per paper/film, so a total of two to three hours; so less work than a paper. We will be graded on the quality of our “edits” which will be in turn edited by Tim.