Week 6 Reflection: Wikis in my Online Course?

I've been thinking about how I would use a wiki in the courses that I'm teaching right now. I'm currently teaching at the Vancouver Learning Network, and though each teacher essentially has autonomy in what happens in his or her own course, something as big as adding a wiki to the curriculum would definitely be a group effort. Some questions that may arise:

1) At the moment, everything is attached to a gradebook. For example, we have online discussions, and each discussion can be assessed with a mark out of 10. We punch in this mark every time we mark a discussion post and the gradebook is automatically updated. This kind of set-up allows students to continue discussing - every time I assess a discussion posting, their mark goes up. They see it go up, and as a result, it's very clear cut about how they can succeed (what kind of posts count as 'quality', the necessity of responding to others and not just posting your own thoughts, etcetera). With a wiki, I'm not sure how these grades would work - I would have to manually go into the gradebook each time to update their mark based on their most recent edit. This could cause problems when it comes to multiple edits (for example, what I've marked and what I haven't). I can see from this week's links that WetPaint allows you to track the participation of students. At the moment though, I have approximately one hundred and fifty English 12 students. Would managing this kind of participation be overwhelming?

2) Monitoring polite behaviour on discussion boards is an ongoing task. I've had to delete posts, send e-mails to students about discussion etiquette; I know that one teacher has had a very serious situation on the discussion boards simply because students weren't taking each other's criticism constructively (and weren't giving criticism constructively either). I'm already thinking about removing the Sharing Short Stories discussion board from my course next year. Would having students edit each other's work be a lot of trouble in this regard?

3) My department, at the moment, is thinking about creating a blog as part of the course next year and already this is quite the subject for the discussion. How many posts? How can it be monitored? In our course, students can join any time between September to April. How can we make these kinds of "external" assignments manageable, so that the requirements are clear and we aren't pulling our hair out at the end?

4) I'm participating in an inquiry team at the moment, and we're investigating assessment for learning at our school. One question that has been brought up is the problem of everything in our courses being attached to the gradebook. This is yet another issue here: does the wiki have to be attached to the gradebook? Maybe it can just be a participation thing? Terry The Tennis Ball, the link that Patrice provided on her discussion board this week, is a good example. Collaborating online in this way is fun, and perhaps can be just a participation mark instead of a mark on grammar/writing.

Despite all the questions, having a collaborative wiki is an exciting prospect. I'm in charge of English 12 at summer school this summer, and it will be a good time to pilot this kind of project. That way, if it is too much, I won't be stuck with it for a full year. But an exciting prospect? Definitely!