Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: wikis and collaboration: approaches to deploying wikis in educational settings Steven Warburton King’s College London steven.warburton@kcl.ac.uk http://del.icio.us/stevenw/wiki-workshop-2006-11
2. Slide 2: i) do wikis require a paradigm shift?
3. Slide 3: new or old technology? • wiki • Hawaiian word meaning ‘quick’ used by Ward Cunningham in 1994 to name the asynchronous collaborative tool he developed for use on the Internet • wiki evolution can be interpreted as part of the long history of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) • examples: • http://en.wikipedia.org • http://en.wikibooks.org • http://en.wikiversity.org (open course materials, started August 2006) • perhaps the question is not: “why wiki?” but “why now?”
4. Slide 4: the tipping point • social nature of learning • social-constructivism • situated learning • dialogue and negotiated meaning • collaboration, community and creativity • socio-technical and cultural changes • ambient technology, ubiquitous computing • shift from community to networks • web-natives, digital natives, net generation • web 2.0 » read/write web -> consumer becomes producer » complexity, emergent behaviour and emergent classifications » the rise of social software
5. Slide 5: discussion fora social recommendation IRC & discovery instant messaging blogs social tools wikis social bookmarks collaboration social networks
6. Slide 6: e-learning: dominant model? • reusable learning objects • standards (SCORM, LOM) • digital repositories (silos) • scripted learning activities • content and assessment driven (the VLE) • a classical hierarchical industrial model that can respond to increasing student numbers? how do wikis fit into the world described above?
7. Slide 7: closed and open systems, hierarchies vs. networks, nupedia to wikipedia Brooks Law (1975) Linus’ Law • • As the number of “Given enough eyeballs, all programmers N rises, the bugs are shallow” (Linus work performed also scales Torvalds) as N, but the complexity and vulnerability to mistakes rises or as N squared • “Conceptual integrity in turn • Given a large enough beta- dictates that design must tester and co-developer base, proceed from one mind, or a almost every problem will be very small number of characterised quickly and the agreeing resonant minds” fix obvious to someone.
8. Slide 8: ii) can wikis be put to effective educational use?
9. Slide 9: what are the main reported problems in introducing wikis? there seem to be two recurring themes: 1. fear of loosing control by levelling the authority structures 2. a lack of approved ways to administer [group] assessment and to rate individual performance source: various case studies and literature on wikis in use
10. Slide 10: wiki features • Wikis maximize interplay. • Wikis are democratic • Wikis work in real time. • Wiki technology is text-based • Wikis permit public document construction (distributed authorship) • Wikis complicate the evaluation of writing • Wikis promote negotiation • Wikis permit collaborative document editing, or open editing. • Wikis make feedback intensely public and potentially durable. • Wikis work on volunteer collaboration. [cooperative] • Wikis endorse particular ways of writing. • Wikis enable complete anonymity. From dossiers practiques by Renée Fountain
11. Slide 11: exploring pedagogical potential learning: activities: • students create content: • group project work knowledge production and • building shared synthesis repositories • ownership and autonomy • conference style • linking patterns and presentations contextualising • critical peer review • sharing, collaboration • debating course topics, and group work including assigned • reflection readings • dialogue through discussion pages
12. Slide 12: so what does a wiki based educational activity look like? 1. Set up a conference wiki space outlining the theme, topic, linking to relevant resources and detailing tasks/assessment/ethos. 3. Tell learners that in 3 weeks time you'll be hosting an online conference 5. Send out a 'Call [demand] for papers' with instructions e.g. • On the day your paper is presented please post it to the wiki and create an appropriate link from the conference agenda. Please visit the site each day, read relevant papers and post questions and comments after the paper. • You may update your paper throughout the week. In the week following the conference please submit your personal review of the conference. You will receive feedback on your review, paper and interaction with questions and comments. There will be a prize for the best paper. 8. Keep everything rolling (pushing students for titles/abstracts). Do the first paper yourself as a model.
13. Slide 13: Factors influencing Advantages of co-operative collaborative learning: and collaborative learning: • student willingness to participate • mastery and retention of • understanding of all material stakeholders of the • quality in reasoning benefits strategies • an assessment system • process gains: for example that supports the production of new ideas collaboration • transference of learning • distribution of power between teacher and Johnson and Johnson (1990, 2003) student Hodgson and McConnell (1992)
14. Slide 14: supporting a strong collaborative culture • accountability: the prerequisite for reputation • focus and culture: a community charter • trust and identity: personal profile pages • collective memory: FAQs as efficient knowledge repositories • membership criteria from: Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice by Andreas Neus
15. Slide 15: networked collaborative e-learning*: assessing group work • group mark • individual contracts • divided group mark • peer-assessment of contributions • viva “…the most important single issue is often the • project exam tricky matter of establishing the levels of contribution of respective [team] members…” (Race, Brown & Smith, 2005) http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment/group.html *McConnell, D. 2006 E-Learning Groups and Communities. Open University Press
16. Slide 16: iii) what issues do we need to address?
17. Slide 17: tensions • individual, group and community – motives for collaboration and cooperation? – what conditions support strong community formation? – emergent behaviours (critical mass) • content: consumers (students) becoming producers – mass amateurisation, incoherence? • open = chaos? or • open = common purpose? – common purpose gives rise to community based law enforcement (soft security)
18. Slide 18: refactoring • deletion is a major source of contention and discomfort • refactoring or (polite) editing the preferred method – http://199.17.178.148/~morgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?RefactoringPages • signing off changes • caveats: “this is experimental”
19. Slide 19: evaluating wikis • introducing new tools does not change practice • wikis conflict with traditional assumptions about authorship and intellectual property: – why share?: receiving credit for contributions – consent: contributions being revised or deleted • content knowledge can be improved, but this takes time • using new tools in place of other tools works, but it is not the best use of a wiki • quality can be maintained if versions ready for quality assessment are identified • students can be reluctant to contribute to wikis (invisible learner, competencies) • open authoring does not necessarily lead to the destruction, modification or copying of others’ work • visual and design options are limited - wikis are not presentation software source: a variety of case studies, see http://del.icio.us/stevenw/wiki-workshop-2006-11
20. Slide 20: key ideas • appropriation: understanding the use of technologies as being locally situated and allowing for the negotiation of meaning at these sites • context: a wiki used in an educational activity or context is not the same as a wiki used to collaborate and document a workshop
21. Slide 21: some conclusions • scaffold users, lower barriers to participation and provide support • encourage autonomy and ownership which leads to accountability and group cohesion • succinct, accurate and gentle guide for new visitors - rituals and rules become codified within the community through shared practice • personal space (user pages) as identity: reputation reward • co-authorship is not a problem for the students if the guidelines for evaluation are clear • trust your students: appropriation "The basic thing I think makes it work is turning from a model of permissions to a model of accountability" Jimmy Wales, co-founder, Wikipedia
22. Slide 22: iv) what do we see in the future?
23. Slide 23: in the words of Donald Rumsfeld “Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.” Department of Defence news briefing, February 12, 2002
24. Slide 24: knowns and unknowns institutional barriers pedagogy known knowns current student competencies staff competencies impact of Web 2.0 (quality and trust) direction of e-learning (VLE vs. PLE) known unknowns globalisation: communities to networks next generation learners technological? unknown unknowns cultural?