TELL Grant Project: Investigating student use of wikis as academic and personal workspaces

M C Morgan
Dept of English
mmorgan@bemidjistate.edu

While growing in public attention, wikis are little used except in a few businesses and among scholars of hypertext and new media. Some educators who have tinkered with wikis are apprehensive about their value, discovering in their brief work with them, just how rhetorically difficult they can be to incorporate into daily teaching and scholarly work. Most, in the end, opt for using a weblog for their academic online work. I suspect that, while technically easy to use, wikis demand more attention than, for instance, keeping a weblog or even a paper notebook and writing simple word processed documents. Wikis are hypertextual spaces: potent for use, but demanding new writing strategies and more cognitive overhead than either a blog or a paper or online notebook.

While wikis are typically used for collaborative work, they are also useful for indivdual use, both personal and academic, and can be a powerful online personal notebook. However, simply placing a wiki within easy reach of students doesn't mean the their use will amount to much. While the technial hurdles are low, there are rhetorical and discursive boundaries to confront and overcome. Writing a single page on a wiki is easy; managing an ever-growing number of pages can become difficult.

This project is a small, brief, naturalistic study of how students incorporate a wiki in their academic and personal work. It seeks to discover some of the uses students put them to; what features they tend to use and those they do not; the writing strategies and practices students use in writing with a wiki; as well as some of the rhetorical problems they encounter and how they address them. It makes no claim to evaluating practices, only to locate them and catalogue them.

Project Summary

Ten students will be asked to incorporate the use of a wiki into their academic work habits. They will be trained in the basics of using the wiki, shown some examples, and given some ideas for use. Their work will be followed for a semester to discover how the students use the wiki for academic and personal ends; that is how often, in what situations, and with what reported changes in their study routines and writing habits.

The study will look at

• what kinds of written work students undertake on the wiki
• what strategic and rhetorical difficulties students run into
• how they address those difficulties
• what limits students find in using a wiki
• what virtues students find
• what limits and virtues the investigator discovers

With regards to writing and process, questions include

• when do students use the wiki
• for what writing tasks: notes, drafts of papers, complete papers, personal uses...
• what features do they employ, including linking, version tracking, consulting the index, ...
• what page structuring features do they tend to use for what purposes: heads, subs, bullets ...
• what kinds of diffiiculties do they run into and how do they address those difficulties
• how, by self-report, do students adapt their writing processes to the wiki

If students use the wiki to compose course papers, I may track them from notes on the wiki to submitted final version.

With regards to the wiki workspace space

• how and when they use linking
• how they name topics
• how they organize the workspace
• virtues and difficuties they report

Collaboration

• While this is not a study in collaborative use, participants will be shown how wikis are used for collaboration and encouraged to permit others to work with them on the wiki.

Method

Students will be selected by interview, based on their interest in participation. I will attempt to locate four of each: freshmen, juniors, and seniors. Data collected will include

• pre-study interview
• weekly journal responses written on the wiki
• periodic face to face interviews
• access to and regular snapshots of their wiki
• concluding interview

I might expect 25 - 50% of the students to drop out of the study before its completion; but reasons for abandoning the wiki may be sigificant. If warranted, follow up interviews and analyses would be taken at the end of a second semester to track any further development.

Assessment

I expect a successful completion of the study: collecting data, making an ongoing and timely analysis, and writing up a report. I will analyze the data to locate and classify signficant features and behaviors, following the investigative questions above, and write a report of the findings, posted on line.

Budget

From $0.00 to $600.00 - $1,000 for remuneration of participants.

I have a server and server space available at biro.bemidjistate.edu. The wiki software (PMWiki or MediaWiki?) is open source, and available at no charge.

If possible, I'd like remuneration for the subjects of $100.00 for completing the study. I can adjust the budget to accommodate funds granted.

Publication

• I will write a report on the investigation as a whole, giving an overview of the findings and defining questions for further invetigation. The report will be available on the web.
• I will present on the findings that are significant to faculty and students at BSU at an appropriate campus forum.
• I will incorprorate the study and findings into two courses I teach (Weblogs and Wikis and Teaching Writing with Technology).
• I will submit the project as a presentation at this year's Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference (MSU Mankato, November).

Signatures

Faculty member: __________________________________________________________

Chair: ____________________________________________________________________

Dean: ____________________________________________________________________

Date: 21 April 2006