TWEAK Tweaking Wikis for Education and Advancement of Knowledge

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TWEAK -Tweaking Wikis for Education and
Advancement of Knowledge

• Ingvill Rasmussen, Andreas Lund, Ole Smørdal
• Intermedia, Universitetet i Oslo

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Intervention study

• University of Oslo, InterMedia project with extra
  funding for 2008 from Network for IT-Research and
  Competence in Education ITU to
• To develop learning practices for the future
• Focus on task-tool
• First different wiki types and the teacher trying
  out new tasks
• Then re-design of wiki and new tasks

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Interest

• How do digital tools contribute to structuring
  learning activities?
• Key issue in technology is how we store and
  retrieve information. In relation to school
  learning this is not a trial issue since schools
  have the mandate to build up collective or social
  memory
• Sociocultural perspective on learning. In this
  work my focus on learning is on how individuals,
  institutions and societies retain, transfer and
  make available knowledge to the next generation
  and whether and/or how this is appropriated

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Wikis

• Different wiki services offer different features
• Simple websites with flat and open structure for
  co-writing with the possility to create and edit
• Also wikis include the ability to compare
  versions of a page and track who did what when
• Meta functions (Chat, comments, history, reports)
• We have tried out two different types of wikis
  MediaWiki ? XWiki Confluence
• MediaWiki Encyclopedic orientation- similar to
  Wikipedia. Two types of links (blue / red),
• XWiki and Confluence similar orientation,
  organized for groupwork and hence are more
  similar to other groupware technologies. Comments
  and attachments

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Not new ideas

• We come to knowledge by taking part in collective
  activities that evolve over time, and where
  language and material artifacts function as
  collective structural resources (Valsiner van
  der Veer, 2000)
• How we use language to think together (Mercer,
  2000)

All the greatest achievements of mind have been
beyond the power of unaided individuals. Charles
S. Peirce (18391914)
I live in a world of others words and my entire
life is an orientation in this world. Michael
Bakhtin (1895-1975)
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Schools (16-19 year old students)

• Western senior high
• Different groups of students, but the same
  teacher
• English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
• Eastern senior high
• Modern history
• All the students in 3rd grade (18-19 year old)
• 4 teachers (modern history team)

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Tools and tasks

• Types
• Narratives
• Scenarios
• Alternatives
• Hypotheses
• Causes
• Correlations
• Connections
• Syntheses
• etc

result gt n1 n2 nx
individual ? collective
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Task 1

• Our USA
• How we (Norwegian 17-year olds)
• perceive the USA

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3. praksiser
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Findings

• Two types of collaboration
• Peer group level (I scratch your back and you
  scratch mine)
• Orientation toward the whole class- participatory
  production (links to others and invitations
  blue and red)

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• Task 2
• Funkytown
• How we perceive a typical British town

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Findings

• Editing language errors
• Commenting- not editing content
• Joint focus in the class
• Extensive text production

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Findings and implications

• Different tasks and different collaborative
  orientations
• Orientation to the whole production and editing
  seems difficult for students
• Implication Prompting participatory production

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• Task 3
• What is the UK/US influence on the
  English-speaking world?

• How does your contribution fit in the general
  assignment?
• How does your contribution relate to those of
  your classmates?

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Tensions and contradictions

• Teacher This is a place where you can all
  go and see what you have done and share
  information
• Anne Or they can steal!

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Teacher 1 Wiki now, I have been part of
several stages of the wiki life and the first one
was very, then I lost the learners because they
were given an assignment a wiki works in the way
that from the moment you have published your
material everybody owns it, everyone can change
it, and. eh, it was difficult to trace, for me
as a teacher, who had contributed with what, and
I felt that I lost the learners, I did not know
where to go in order to guide them () because in
general there is no extensive space for a teacher
in ICT applications in class, it is difficult
to know what is the function of the teacher
because everything is automatically moving, it
becomes a separate world, it becomes so
expansive. () When we have used wikis in
projects they learners tend to disappear into
their separate worlds and it becomes difficult
for me to guide them and maintain my job as a
knowledge provider. () I dont know what is the
end product, what I am supposed to assess at the
end, what I should assess, what a grade is
applied to. () My challenge as a teacher is that
I need to develop competence, how to learn how to
assess learners work in a wiki and, in addition,
develop better tasks so that they cannot solve
the task individually and that they cannot solve
it by merely copy-and-paste operations.
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Findings/implications for re-design

• Epistemological shift wiki as an artifact
  grounded in collective epistemology, new cultural
  tools challenge and do seem to activities
• However
• Collaboration ? Collectivity (participatory
  production). Not necessary the same
• Tension individual/collective ownership
  (copying). This shows tensions in relation to
  more traditional institutional practices or more
  traditional ways of structuring the learning
  activities
• We thought revisions needed prompting- needed
  prompting to relate to the whole development of
  content (participatory production)
• The teachers experience/voice
• Need for developing meta features that add up to
  teacher space. Teacher present offline, abdicates
  online
• Need for new types of tasks assessment

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Wiki re-design

• Spaces for teacher intervention
• Participating (tag-cloud and commenting)
• Chat
• Tool for assessment based on interactions
  (microgenetic), individual trajectory
  (ontogenetic), collective result (sociogenetic)
• Prompting pupils participatory production
• Tag-cloud (Prompting active engagement with
  copied content, defining central concepts, and
  mapping relations between concepts)
• Commenting (relate to peers texts)
• Chat
• Linking

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• Teacher 2 In my school we have always
  started with classroom instruction and then
  handed out task assignments to the pupils and
  these have usually been conducted by using Word.
  Quite traditionally I would think.
• I have often divided my class in three
  and given three different tasks and then I have
  told them to answer one task assigned to them and
  then to comment on the answers that others have
  given on their tasks. So, in that way the work is
  not only to answer a question handed out by me,
  but also to evaluate how other pupils have
  replied and to add critical input or
  complementary information to that what others
  have written. And that is ehmmactually a very
  new way of working compared to what I have done
  previously.
• When someone has written a reply or when
  someone has written a contribution, then the
  commenting has often been but this was not the
  most central, the central issue was this or that.
  Then they relate to- they problematise each
  others contributions in a way that I find to be
  of great value and in a way that they seldom do
  in relation to for example a textbook because
  they just accept that as an authority. But when
  it comes to commenting on each other, then there
  is more of an opening for them to correct
  something or that it is possible to be critical
  to what is written. In that way, their own
  commenting seems to be more thought provoking
  than say for example a textbook or even what I
  say- because far too often they just take that
  as a given.

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Task 4 Commenting

• The task is First to read one quote from Kennedy
  and one quote from Khrusjtsjov, then answer
  questions and then comment others answers.

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Findings- what do they mean?

• Students copy content from the Internet but are
  at the same time protective towards their
  individual contributions - stable
• Only the features that were close to the
  traditional school tradition were appropriated.
• Teachers tried out new types of tasks that stayed
  with the school tradition while at the same time
  these tasks introduced new ways of participating
  and sharing of individual work.
• The students gladly commented and shared texts
  but never edited each others texts other than
  minor language errors

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How digital tools contribute to structuring
learning activities?

• New practices in storing and retrieving
  information
• Powerful devices for collective remembering-
  linking past and future in different ways, e.g.
  copying, looking and reading what others have
  done.
• New ways of participating
• Commenting as an example of new division of
  labour between teachers and students.
• Commenting (and msn and other chat tools) helps
  the students meta-communication.

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How digital tools contribute to structuring
learning activities?

• Editing
• Wiki research different finding- University
  students edit but younger students are reluctant
  to do so
• Explaining the reluctance to editing
• Separating importance from trivia is a late
  developing skill
• Intersubjectivity and intervention. The need to
  establish mutual understanding (I want to know
  what my peers are doing before I will edit.
  Comments and chat can help to reach such
  understanding)

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How digital tools contribute to structuring
learning activities?

• Design of tools and school tradition/practices
• Prior research and our own findings shows that
  computer prompts impact teachers and learners
  talk and activities
• However, the relationship between designers
  intentions and activities are never straight
  forward
• What does it mean that only features closest to
  the school tradition were appropriated?
• Is then nothing changing in schools?
• Or does small changes matter?