Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building

other links:

• Janine Lim #1
• Janine Lim #2

Justin Fire Reich, Harvard University; Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University; John B. Willett, Harvard University The Sequential Analysis of Individual versus Collaborative Writing Processes in Wikis. Allan C. Jeong, Florida State University; Patricia Anne Heeter, Florida State University

Slides

(blog EdTechResearcher on Education Week)

Findings (low income vs high income schools)

• failed or trail wiki 50% - 30%
• teacher-content wiki 34% - 35%
• individual student-owned wiki 15% - 35%
• collaborative student-owned wikis 2% - 1%

• Are great wikis born or made?
• Time is precious (Reimann 2009)
  • collaborative learning unfolds over time
    • substantive need
  • learning environments track data in real time
    • methodological opportunity

• Glassman and Kang (2011): wikis not only enable students to participate in KB, but allow the enactment of Dewey's vision
• Dohn (2009): Web 2.0 tools are theoretically well-suited, but educational logics of individual assessment prevent these practices from being realized

Can we use “big date” to answer this?

• 180k public PBworks wikis (self-selected as educational wikis)
• %1 random sample, 406 US K12 wikis, (255 public school), 43 states

• interviewing teachers about what they care about
  • collaborate
  • technology literacy skills
  • develop subject knowledge
• 21st century skills (mapped onto the above)
  • expert thinking
  • new media literacy
  • complex communication

Wiki quality instrument

• 24 questions (yes/no)
• quality scale 0-24
• special web browser that makes it easier to scroll through wikis
• manual ranking
• trying to use automatic measures like numbers of edits - wikis are so diverse that it's impossible

Sample at multiple time points (7, 14, 30, 60, 100, 400 days) - spent a long time choosing why those specific time points

Empirical growth modelling, multilevel model for change? The model you choose answers the research question.

If you know the quality on day 7, you can predict how it will develop with great accuracy. Ie. great wikis are born, rather than made.

• Norms developed early on wiki are powerful in shaping later use
• Wiki design deserves critical attention
• Further qualitative studies of wiki using communities should ensure they are there from the very beginning

Justin Fire Reich, Harvard University; Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University; John B. Willett, Harvard University

Open grounded theory coding of wikis.

• concatenation
• copyediting
• co-construction
• commenting
  • meta-content
• discussion
  • respond to comments for at least four conversational turns
• scheduling
• planning

All of these are very rare.

(Note: does not show collaboration in real-life (sitting next to each other and using the same computer, etc)

• 90% have no collaboration
• huge taboo of deleting or changing anything that other people produce (Lindsay Grant, I dont care do ur own page)
• complex communications strongly co-occurring with other quality indicators

(context 70% of all SourceForge projects have one developer, only 2% have more than 10 developers)

Rachel F. Moll, Vancouver Island University; Julia Hengstler, Vancouver Island University

Allan Jeong, Patricia Heeter, Florida State University

Sample of process data from wikis

• Tension between individual ownership and group ownership
• Need strategies to encourage studented to work together

• what are processed that identify individual vs collaborative writing
• what collaborative processes are really taking place
• how can we operationalize, measure and visualize collaborative writing process

Timing and flow of activities when using ShrEdit (Olson et al 1992)

• 8 students, designing for online collaborative learning
• 3 wikis
• wiki was very structured, for each strategy they needed a certain format

• what did they add (paragraph, text), did they add to a previously existing paragraph, edit
• paragraph as unit of analysis

“Discussion Analysis Tool” (Excel tool)

Rachel F. Moll, Vancouver Island University; Julia Hengstler, Vancouver Island University

Complexity thinking - Davis & Sumara 2006