The Wiki Way
Wikis are collaborative web sites where anyone with the proper permission can edit
the pages in place.
In practice, the Wiki Way is about building on-line knowledge-bases
by a community of contributors through collaborative editing.
The Wiki Way: form follows function / content is king
The original context of the web
A group of professionals in the same discipline who already have a culture of information sharing with well established procedures for
Group editing & authoringAttribution and creditAuthority citationPeer reviewLevels of publication
The basics
basic properties
hypertextualasynchronouscollaborative unstructured
emergent properties
Pioneers become settlers / process becomes product
Rapid change :: rapid response
Contribution: the 1 to 999 ratio
Stylistics and readability
Systemic bias of users: geographic, linguistic, technical
Scalability is not technical but administrative & organizational
The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)
Wikis are textual but not fixed like print“A characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another medium” -MM
I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movieWikis in Plain English
The best place to read more about wikis isthe ‘wiki’ article on Wikipedia
pedagogy
Wikis work best where the goal is the accumulation of knowledge about discrete subject(s) over time, and where the contributions are collaborative in nature; they emphasize the ongoing process of knowledge accumulation.
Wikis are not well designed for projects where the attributions and authorship of individual contributors is paramount (as in traditional publishing), or where the goal is the presentation of perfected final product that does not need feedback (as in the traditional web site).
AuthorAuthor-ity
The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)
The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)
The wiki knowledge model privileges content over authorship
and is conducive to constructivism
Knowledge Base
Multiple, Independent, Varying Sources of Knowledge
“[A]uthorship data is irrelevant and sometimes even
detrimental to the creation of truly communal repositories of
knowledge”
Holloway, Bozicevic, Börner (2005) re GNU Free Document License
wikiphobia
Middlebury
A necessary but not sufficient
response
You
You tell me…
Imposing order
– Structure• Editorial style and control must come from the
culture of the users• Because it doesn’t come from the software
– Attribution• Wikis are fundamentally about the end product• So methods of attribution must be made explicit
– both citation to external sources– and internal authorship attributions
• Especially over time with multiple generations of students editing each others work
Some pedagogical issues
Learning outcome assessment
How do we assess whether this is an effective way to learn ?
Student assessment
As in other group activities, how do we measure and grade individual student contributions ? (Other online social software systems such as blogs and forums still maintain authorship modes so that reputation can be assessed. Wikis in general, and Mediawiki in particular, do not make this easy, nor have the tools to do this as easily as the traditional LMS, for example.)
Discipline specific issues
How do wikis fit into the corporate and group authorship that is a norm in some fields, especially the sciences, and some social sciences, e.g. psychology ?
Probably pretty well
How does a non-sequential, disruptive technology such as a wiki fit with the notion of a course as a graduated series of knowledge and abilities that build on one another ?
The course
“Homer” and the Homeric traditionHerodotus
The Aristotelian commentatorsServius and the Vergilian tradition
PlinyVarro
Martianus Capella and the 7 Liberal ArtsIsadore of Seville
Jewish TorahIslamic hadith
Tales of 1001 NightsIranian epic and dastans
Mediaeval epicCarmina Burana
Dante commentatorsVeda
Upanishads & commentatorsDharmashastras and law texts
Sutras & commentariesBuddhist Pali canon
MahabharataRamayana
Kalidasa & commentatorsSpring and Autumn Annals
Confucius tradition“Lao Tzu”
Chuang Tzu tradition
Text and AggregationIntertext and Commentary
Beyond the compendium model:some examples that work
– Production• Oberon – group design and management of
a full scale theater production
– Collaborative writing• Penguin Wiki novel
– The commentarial wiki• Pynchon• Hitchcock
Technical Issues (Pro)
• Getting one up and running is quick, cheap and easy – Almost all popular wiki software runs on the LAMPP platform, some on Windows
– Hardware requirements for smaller wikis are minimal
• The Open Source advantage– If it doesn’t do something you want, check that someone else has already done it, or just add it yourself
Technical Issues (Con)
• $upporting $omething el$e $yndrome• Policies
– How well can standard user policies apply?– User accounts & roles– Who decides who has rights to what– Retention & data management
• External Security• Wiki spam and grafitti• bots• Software exploits
• The Open Source disadvantage– If it doesn’t do something you want, check that someone else has already done it; if not and you can’t fix it yourself, you suffer
Best Practices
Accounts– Non-anonymity encourages responsibility– Limit your editors
Define editor groups to edit main content
Grant editorship as you would in a paper based system
Consider allowing all user to leave comments
Policies– Define and publish explicit editorial & content policies– Plan for the future of the data
“The message of print: the principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity.”
And…finally, wiki as a medium…
“It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."
"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally."
Marshall McLuhan