Wiki Mentors

Learning Objectives

While completing this activity, you should:

• Get a better sense of what other people are doing to the OSU Wiki.
• Provide a real service to three of your peers by giving them outside advice and perspective on their Wiki Plan and Draft Wiki activities.
• Discover that giving useful advice and mentoring ideas to someone else pays unexpected dividends. (What can I say -- I'm an optimist!  -- Dave Sullivan)

Requirements

Go to the Wiki Mentor List to determine who you should mentor. For each student you are to mentor, click on their MyTalk page to read their Wiki Plan and Draft Wiki ideas. Use their Contributions page to look at the actual changes they have made to the OSU Wiki. (Note: if they are making changes to another wiki, then you will need to follow the links in their Overview of my Contributions section of their MyTalk page to determine what they have done.)

After you have used these pages to collect ideas about what each student has done, add a section to their MyTalk page titled, "Mentoring ideas from Username" where you insert your actual ONID username in the section heading. Inside this new section, put a subheading titled, "Ideas as of Date and Time" where you insert the actual date and time. Under this subheading, write your suggestions and advice.

When you return later, add a new subheading for your comments with a new date and time. Put each new subheading at the top of your Mentoring section, so that older ideas get pushed down. Thus, I am asking you to create a blog-like list of mentoring ideas inside each of three MyTalk pages. If the last few paragraphs made little sense, my recommendation is to look carefully at the images shown below.

	Each student's User Contributions page shows a complete list of the entries that user has made to the OSU Wiki.
	By clicking on the Diff link in a User Contributions page, you can see a side-by-side comparison of what an individual entry changed.
	This shows how to add a blog-like set of mentoring ideas to a student's MyTalk page.

What should you do if one of the people you are to mentor hasn't written a wiki plan?

Some students drop the class; others are clueless and may not have started it yet. If one of the people you are to mentor simply hasn't written anything in the OSU Wiki, write a polite note encouraging them to get started. That way, you have done your part ...

Grading: Part 1 and Part 2

This activity will be graded in two ways. Part 1 will be due fairly early in the term, and it will merely check to see that you have begun leaving comments for the people you are supposed to mentor. Thus, this will not evaluate the quality of your comments ... the purpose of this part will be to make sure everyone has an incentive to get started.

Part 2 will measure how effective and useful your comments were. Most of this evaluation will come from surveying your peers about quantity and quality of the comments you posted in their MyTalk pages.

Test your work!

Make sure your mentoring ideas are where your peers can find them. Go to the Wiki Mentor List, scroll down the table until you find the row with your College of Business Username. Then click on each of the three MyTalk links on your row.

If for some reason these links do not lead to pages with blog-like sections containing your mentoring ideas, then try to determine what when wrong when you attempted to follow the instructions above. Alternatively, if you have difficulty with any step in this process, get in touch with Dave Sullivan.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
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