Attended a workshop on wikis today designed to orient those new to wikis. During the Q&A, one person asked if there were any tools similar to MS-Word where faculty could insert comment bubbles.
I’ve heard this concern echoed elsewhere and I think it’s certainly a valid one, especially for those coming from English Departments where there are many situations where you don’t necessarily want to enter corrections, but you do want to pose questions to the student in order to clarify or consider another line of thought.
While many wikis offer a Comments tool, I haven’t seen one that offers it inline; usually the Comments section is placed at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar; moreover, writing faculty often prefer making inline comments and questions because they make it easy for both them and the student(s) to see the immediate context that needs more clarification or follow-up. Comments in their current wiki iteration, on the other hand, seem to be more oriented towards globally-oriented or macro-level commentary.
So this raises some potentially interesting questions: Do faculty need to bring a different mindset to wikis and find other means for accomplishing the same objective? If so, would designers be ignoring that fundamental usability mantra: know thy user
? Should designers look to revise the wiki interface that allows for inline interrogation?
Filed under: Collaboration, Design, Distance Education, Teaching
