Lessons learned about Wiki use

A post by Michael Hanley reminded me that blogging takes discipline and like going to the gym, if you give up on posting regularly because of other commitments, it is easy just to get out of the habit. (I have been remiss in both instances: the posting and the exercise!)

In my case, I have been trying to keep up with some great blog posts, including one from Ken Allen on support in learning, and the e-course on work literacy, along with my own research for my dissertation on organizational learning and research for my class on visuals and electronic aids in teaching speech composition and presentation.

However, this week is wiki week on the work literacy, and while I think the personal learning information is good on wikis, there is so much more to the use of wikis than the tool itself when used collaboratively in the classroom.

A Multiclass Wiki Project

One problem with using a wiki in formal training is that it is difficult to measure the actual learning that takes place in using the wiki, especially if the final product is a "mess". However, I found the more my students experimented and communicated through the wiki, more learning took place outside of the classroom and wiki.

I used the same wiki for an ongoing project between classes, to plan and execute an online conference. At the university level, this means that students could take part in a long term project outside of the semester. The first semester, a group of global communication students planned an online conference, including the title of the conference and audiences (international), along with some background material. Students in two different classes the next semester then performed different tasks that were laid out from a document from the previous class and my own format to help structure the work they would need to do outside of class.

Findings from Multiclass Project

Set up is important. I made the assumption when I initially set up the wiki that each group would be able to develop their own way of using the wiki. However, I soon found that unless they were granted ownership, and encouraged to use the wiki as "group" property, that they would not take ownership of the wiki.

I found that a front page that is used for logistics and acts like an aggregator or organizational tool (table of contents) for the group helped groups to develop their own group pages without feeling as if they were stepping on toes.

The wiki should have instructions on how it should be used for that specific wiki. I found that by establishing protacols such as color coding changes or adding icons to areas that had been changed or tasks that had been completed, helped establish the boundaries for the use of the wiki. Even though the changes would show up in a separate post, my students wanted to find the changes within the context of the page and quickly (i.e. seeing the icons).

Halfway through the second semester, a group of students and myself sat down to establish instructions that fit the groups' purposes. This might be necessary as groups change and/or the project requires a new structure.

The wiki should be perceived as a tool for collaboration, not a piece of collaboration. Once my students started using the wiki as a means of collaboration, the wiki itself became a mess. This meant that students would then need to go back in, edit and restructure the information so that it was accessible for readers outside of the group. This editing process was much more of a learning tool than the final product. When I asked students to give a presentation on what they had learned, the wiki was a vital center piece to their learning process. However, the learning they presented to me was not obvious in the wiki view.

I belive one reason for this might be the tacit learning that wikis promote through the collaborative writing process. There are also group processes that happen outside of the wiki space, such as leadership, conflict resolution, group organization, the development of group norms, inter and intragroup relations, the development of trust (cognitive and affective), group assumptions, and shared cognition. Of course, this will make the use of wikis less than desirable for organizations that want proof of learning.

It's the process, not the product. All of these points leads to the conclusion that the process of creating the wiki is where the learning is. As such, work on the wiki should include assessments that allow students to demonstrate what they have learned, not just the final product that they come up with. For example, I had my students blog about what they were learning as they used the wiki. I also had them give a presentation on the project they worked on. Often the wiki was a record they could go back to which gave some evidence of what they had done. However, they admitted that the work on the wiki (e.g. mistakes made that needed to be corrected, misunderstandings that were resolved, identification of resources from multiple sources) was much more important to their learning than other activities they did in class or the final outcome.

In addition, the wiki was a document that only those that went through the process could really understand. Therefore, something that looked like a mess to me, was understood by the group members as it fit their communication and group norms.

Wiki products/documents may need to be "translated" or interpreted for the outside reader. My students found that they also learned through the comments and questions features (although not as much as I feel they could have) and through class discussions with others outside of the class. They were often surprised when others outside of their group had difficulty following the way their document read. It is important, therefore, when a wiki is used for learning or even within an organizational environment, that feedback be actively solicited. It is not enough to ask readers to "post their comments". The feedback should be targeted. This is one reason why we established an icon protacol to help monitor tasks.

The wiki should be easy to read and follow. One complaint I had from my students was that the document was boring and hard to read based the set up. They wanted pictures and better design (e.g. text boxes with additional information). They also would have appreciated more audio visuals such as podcasts or embedded videos. Many of the wiki software now includes templates for those with limited programming and software design skills.

The uses of Wikis in formal learning

Finally, there are three main uses of wikis in formal learning: sharing and communication of information, collaboration, and developing a permenant record of information.

My students used the wiki as part of their conference to keep track of the logistics of the conference. The conference went on for 12 hours. Each group had a designated "trouble shooter" for 4 hours at a time. The students chose times for check in during the day to identify any problems. For example, the group taking care of registration, needed to "dump" the names into an excel file on a regular basis so that the limited file space of the free registration software they used would free up (they were only allowed 50 names at a time). At the beginning of the conference, the registration closed out. The group keeping track of the promotion were contacted by various people trying to register for the conference indicating that the registration would not work. They posted this problem on the wiki so those in charge of registration and technology were appraised of the problem within the first check in period. By the next check in period the issue was resolved, so other members of the trouble-shooting team knew what was going on.

In another of my classes, students put together a wikipage for an online class presentation that drew resources from a number of places. Students used the wiki first as a collaborative space, in which they learned about the choice of technology in instructional design through colloborating on the presentation.

The wiki then became an information tool as they used the document to present how a specific technology worked ( a wiki in one case, and a podcast in another).

Influencing others to enter Web 2.0

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I spend the last weekend with my sister and her family. She is my oldest sister (I have 3 sisters and a brother) and is in her 50's. She was explaining the difficulties she has been having at work. A speech pathologist, she is part of an agency the provides services to disabled pre-schoolers and school aged students including evaluations and therapy in the areas of speech, occupational therapy, special education and tutoring, social work, and physical therapy.

The problem is that over the 15 years that she has been working at this organization, the group has grown from 20 employees to over 200 employees and independent contractors. Being in the field of social services, the workers prefer a flat organization in which each person has some say in their work. At the same time, the administration in this field has become very structured with mandates at the Federal, state, and local (county) levels, sometimes contradicting each other. The problem then becomes how to coordinate the paperwork needed while giving equal input into the process.

My brother-in-law, married to the corporate top down total control of the entire process philosophy of management was advocating having the directors wrest control of the process and "making" the employees follow the rules. However, this is like herding geese (notice I said geese and not cats) in that those that don't want to be herded will turn around and bite. Others will just fly the coupe. So I suggested using a wiki. I gave my sister the web address for PBWiki as it is password protected (there needs to be security), so she could play around with it before presenting it as an option to help the work process.

The Results

Yesterday, my sister called. She was so excited that:

1. She, a 50 something, brought in technology that no one else had heard of in the organization
2. She had set up a wiki that could be used by the team and the parent (she went well beyond what I could have imagined) all by herself
3. The parent she was working with thought she was really cool in being able to communicate using modern ways
4. Her group could now work together better to provide better service

This is a test group and if it works out, it can be replicated by her organization. I am very excited for her.

This got me to thinking, how can we make others aware of programs and technological solutions to their organizational communication problems? How can we make those decision makers and workers who have some influence aware of the current management practices and the new ways to configure work tasks so they will look for new tools to help them?

How did I get here (blogging)

Karyn Romeis posed the question for her dissertation, "how did you get here?" in the use of Web 2.0 tools. Interestingly enough, I am not an early adaptor when it comes to technology. I will try out tools, however, if I feel that it will help in my teaching.

I don't think that I have really come into being a "blogger" as much as a reader of blogs. I do blog as a way to keep track of some of my thoughts. However, I don't think that blogging has really accomplished what I had expected of it: creating a space to dialog about ideas. I feel that I can accomplish that better as a commenter of others blogs. For whatever reason, I have had few people actually comment on my blogs (I received the first comment on my blog after a year of blogging, and most recently have had two more people commenting, one regularly!).

By August of 2007, I decided that I could use the blogging to try out the various aspects I read about on the edublogs. For this Vicki Davis's blog has been very helpful in trying different things out. It seems to me that there is so much tacit knowledge gained in blogging. I read about something, then I try it out on my own blog. Just in the process of trying it out, I then can come up with new ways to use it in my teaching and my own learning.

I don't like facebook, although I have found Ning groups that seem much more accessible. For me, the advantage of these programs is they allow for the two way dialog I rarely see in blogs (Tony Karrer's blog is the only one where I actually see "dialog" as opposed to a one way posting/comment). I tried facebook because I had heard of its power on the new generation of workers and students and was curious as to how it worked. At the time I signed up, I signed up as a student so I could play around with it. From facebook, I was invited into a Ning group, which I preferred. I find (as did many of my graduate students) that Ning is a much more rich environment as you can choose the way to participate depending on your preferences. You may just read blogs, you may blog, you can podcast, you can participate in discussion forums (my preference), you can be a lurker, or you can be an active participant. In fact, this is an environment I want to try out more for my teaching and learning for next year.

Finally, my favorite tool for teaching and learning is a wiki. What is surprising is that I almost gave up on the use of wiki after last summer. I was teaching a course on computer supported writing and found the wiki software we were using as not very intuitive. I was part of a pilot program, so out university was just as inexperienced as I was. My first attempt did not work out, which I found disappointing as I am a great believer in collaborative writing as a learning tool. That fall, the university decided that they needed to present some "best practices" workshops, demonstrating how wikis could be used. As I was part of the pilot program, the professional development instructor came to see how I had used the wiki. While I had a contextual idea of how a collaborative writing tool could be used, I could not seem to fit the wiki into that model. After speaking with the workshop instructor, I had a better idea of how the wiki could be used and it has really changed my idea of what happens in collaborative writing (to the point that my ideas for my dissertation on workplace writing for distributed groups has been impacted). It has really made me more open to seeing the impact the wiki can have on both group and individual knowledge creation despite having a poor finished product. Even now, I think of how the use of a wiki can be used in research, in group projects, in team development, in knowledge management, etc...However, I have also learned that the wiki is a tool that can be designed and manipulated in many forms to provide different learning environments (i.e. creating community, creating permanent records and group memory, sharing information, creating processes and procedures) that goes beyond a given time, place, and group of authors.

Corporate guidelines for social software

Tony Karrer's posting on corporate guidelines for social software/web 2.0 had some interesting links. Of all of the corporate guidelines, I liked the Sun corporate policy. First off, I have a bias towards open communication within a company. It is next to impossible to keep secrets in a company, and often the effort backfires and results in hard feelings to the employees. Sun's seems to have a balanced approach:

Don’t Tell Secrets · Common sense at work here; it’s perfectly OK to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces. There’s an official policy on protecting Sun's proprietary and confidential information, but there are still going to be judgment calls.

If the judgment call is tough—on secrets or one of the other issues discussed here—it’s never a bad idea to get management sign-off before you publish.

In my mind, Sun treats their employees with respect and as grown ups with intelligence.

What surprised me about these guidelines, however, is that they assumed that all social software was the same. How can a social book marking program such as del.icio.us be on par with a wiki? A wiki acts very differently than a blog. And shouldn't there be more codes like Sun which recognize the difference between the use of these tools internally and externally? In looking at these codes, the one question that kept popping into my head was who do the management feel own the products of the social networking tools (often they feel it is the property of the individual when something goes wrong, but the property of the corporation if it adds to the corporate value).

Likewise, I wondered who users of social software imagine is their audience. I know that my students rarely think of others reading anything they write except for those in authority or their friends (another reason I like the Sun code as they point out that others might be reading blogs, wiki's, etc..., not just those the author intended should read).

This brings me back to who bloggers write for. I think many write with an imaginary audience (I do) whether that is true or not. I was surprised when Tony Karrer mentioned that my blog was "specialized" as I thought it was very broad. In fact, I tried to write my profile as broadly as possible (which I guess made it specialized).

Blogging vs. Wikis

While bloggers write either for their thought processes or an "imagined" audience, wikis are the result of group interaction. The product of the blog is a record of thoughts, often with little evidence of the thought process that created those ideas. On the other hand, wikis show the thought processes that created an idea. The importance of the wiki is the thought process (and group cognitive development) whereas the importance of the blog is the final thought.

Social networking software such as Ning and Facebook is still another tool that creates totally different dynamics and insights into the creators and contributers. Like a wiki, the process is important, but so is the development of social relationships. Unlike blogs and wikis, the final product is a "feeling", usually of trust or belonging (confirming or disconfirming behavior as group communicators term it). What is important to users are the patterns of communication, the roles that individuals play in their network, and the building of communication.

As a result of the differences in each of these tools, doesn't it make sense to create different "rules" for their use within a corporation? I think the real difficulty is in balancing "rules" with the affordances these tools can bring to the corporation.

Group communication and the wiki

For three semesters now, I have used the wiki as a vital piece of my courses. As I teach both educational technology courses and communication courses, this seems relevant. However, I feel that we are just beginning to understand the importance of using a wiki in terms of knowledge building.

These are some of the questions I am pondering and hoping to answer in the next year or so:

What is really happening in the process of creating a wiki? How is this the same or different than other computer supported writing technologies?

How can we use the transparency of the wiki to help us determine how the group affects the writing process and knowledge building that goes on? Can we develop a way to "capture" the learning that happens when writing as a group?

It seems that wikis begin to take on a dynamic life of their own. When I look at the "product" my students create, it does not necessarily show any learning. Yet, when I ask them to describe their learning (give a presentation on discrete content areas that the blog was supposed to aid in their learning) they seem have a deeper level of learning than more traditional methods (lecture, in-classroom activities, discussion of readings). How does this happen?

What skills and learning styles are best suited for a wiki (both what the students should have before they can use a wiki and what skills can be developed on a wiki)? This is the one area that I do feel I am being to find answers to. First and foremost, wiki users need to have good group communication skills (understanding the group process and roles, group leadership/followship skills, group problem solving and decision making skills, and group writing skills--which is different than individual writing skills). Contrary to popular beliefs, I don't think a wiki will help individual writing skills (at least I have not observed it), nor does good writing skills mean you will be successful in writing on the wiki. Secondly, wiki users need to be able to make connections to ideas. My hypothesis is that spatial thinkers (e.g. those able to write good hyper text) will find the wiki much easier to use than linear thinkers. Expanding this idea, certain cultures might find wiki use more intuitive (generally not Germanic or Anglo cultures which tend to be more linear and individualistic). Finally, clear cut guidelines and learning scaffolding in the use of wikis will be needed for novices, but these are skills that most businesses are looking for, so the wiki would be a good vehicle in developing these skills. Specifically: critical thinking skills, networking and connection of ideas and data, team work, and self regulated work.