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Learning and Teaching Committee report

By Elena Kondyli/11.01.2010

Executive summary

This report is aiming to the use of wikis within a higher education institute, whether it should adopt an institution-wide policy to wikis and if so, what the policy should be and what the potential issues are.  The main findings of this report are:

Wikis are pedagogical applications in education supporting writing instruction

Wikis invigorate writing

Wikis provide a low cost but effective communication and collaboration tool

Wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts

Wikis discourage "product oriented writing" while facilitating "writing as a process"

Wikis ease students into writing for public consumption

Wikis are invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies

Background

According to Charles Mingus "making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity".  In practice the term wiki is applied to a diverse set of systems, features, approaches, and projects (Lamb, 2004).  There are arguments on what constitutes true wikiness.  Some fundamental principals apply like anyone can change anything since they are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined.  Also, wikis use simplified hypertext markup as wikis have their own markup language that essentially strips HTML down to its simplest elements.  Furthermore, wikipage titles are mashed together, often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, mark-up free links between pages within wiki systems.  Finally, the content is ego-less, time-less and never finished, anonymity is not required but it is common.  There are multiple contributors and notions of page authorship and ownership which can be radically change.  Wiki pages are organized by contexts, by links in and links out, and by various categories or concepts emerging in the authoring process.  They are constantly in a state of flux and the entries are often unpolished with gaps left on purpose by the creators, hoping that someone else will fit in and fill in the gaps left behind deliberately.

Current practice

According to Henrik Ibsen "a community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm".  The University of British Columbia is using a number of varied applications, like the Faculty of Applied Science Instructional Support which links wikis into its course management system authoring environment so that designs teams can quickly collaborate to build reference lists and outlines, brainstorming instructional strategies and capture suggestions.  Another example, the Romantic Audience Project at Bowdoin College is a collaborative study collecting entries focusing on poems, poets and topics related to Romantic literature.  The students chose the wiki framework.  Another example comes from the professor Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, who lists a number of medium's strengths for the teaching of writing skills such as "fun" and "wiki" are often associated.  Low cost, effective collaboration and collaboration tool are some of the basic characteristics that a wiki is characterized.

Recommendation

In many respects, wikis contrasts vividly with the traditional approaches of standard groupware and collaborative systems.  Access restrictions, rigidly defined workflows, and structures are anathema to most wiki developers.  One unique characteristic of the wikis is that users define for themselves how their processes and groups will develop, usually by making things up as they go along.  In addition, wikis work great as shared online sketchpads or as spaces for brainstorming.  They are also, excellent for creating perpetually updated lists or collections of links and most users can instantly grasp their utility as informal bulletin boards. One way to use wiki is for a meeting planning where a provisional agenda can be drawn, then the URL is distributed to the participants, who in turn are free to communicate with each other, comment or add their own items.  Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda becomes a note-taking template and when finally the meeting is completed, the notes will be available online, allowing again the participants or anyone else to review or annotate the proceedings.

Issues

There is lack of hard security and privacy and a typical absence of an explicit organizing structure.  In addition, it is easy to recognize a wiki page from a mile away since all the pages more or less are alike.  They lack of colors, aesthetic appeal and they are plain.  Moreover, tracking work in a wiki page may become a logistical nightmare and the management control can easily spin out and as a result a set of protocols to regulate or index them is needed.  Another policy issue that threatens to complicate the widespread adoption of wikis in higher education is the specification of intellectual property (IP) rights by contributors to a wiki page.  Also, as users apply wikis more commonly in their practice, they increasingly come to depend on them.  There is no unified set of software characteristics that are shared by all wikis.

Further reading

Ferris, S. and Wilder, H. (2006) 'Uses and potentials of wikis in the classroom', Innovate, vol. 2, no. 5. Available from: http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol2_issue5/ (accessed 11 January 2010).

Lamb, B. (2004) 'Wide open space: wikis, ready or not', Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October), pp. 36-48. Available from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp (accessed 11 January 2010).

References:

Lamb, B. (2004) 'Wide open space: wikis, ready or not', Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October), pp. 36-48. Available from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

P.S. Very difficult activity for me.  I do not even know if the requirements of this activity are fulfilled with this report.