A7NextGenerationWikis

A7NextGenerationWikis

To-Do

Please Document the Following Sections:

• title for your course project
• members of your team
• abstract
• expected final outcome
• brief description of work done so far on the project
• brief description of work to be done in the next few weeks (e.g.: before spring break)
• describe specific research emphasis of every member of your team
• list of relevant references investigated
• list any specific problems you have encountered and need feedback/guidance on

GerhardComments

suggestions and feedback:

• apply your framework to the Wiki used in our course
• you should interview Hal and Holger about "Next Generation Wikis"
• references: Andrea Forte has done good work (you mention only her work) -- but there is more interesting work
• several of you mentioned trade-offs in their presentation (eg: free for all <-> security, structure to help <-> structure that confines>) -- take a look at the article:

Fischer, G. (2005) "Beyond Binary Choices: Understanding and Exploiting Trade-Offs to Enhance Creativity." In J. S. Gero, & M. L. Maher (Eds.), Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design, Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, pp. 71-92. http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/final-heron05-final.pdf

Members

Ben Jacobson, Jacon Wisnesky, Zaynab Anisi, Eryn Dahlstedt, Maryam Gooyabadi, Aaron Cephers

Title

Next Generation Wikis

Abstract

Research about successful wikis and examine what factors lead to their success. Also look at wikis which failed and find the reasons. The attributes responsible for these successes or failures will lead our research to create the Next Generation Wikis.

Many wikis might lack an innovative format which is intuitive to users. Therefore, we will interview people for: reasons they would like to collaborate, how they like data presented, which existing websites are intuitive to them, what they would like to see in a wiki. Through our interviews we can discover different ways of representing data for different levels of understandings and age groups.

ExpectedOutcome

1. Tangible data on why wikis failed or succeeded

2. Have a group of features which is proven to be more intuitive and will increase collaboration

3. Study in what ways can the Next Generation wiki can be integrated more into education and enhance learning

4. List of features that work and frameworks.

5. A display of how the wiki will look like.

WorkSoFar

Each member read wiki research articles to draw certain conclusions about the current state of wiki's and their potential. Summaries:

• Summary of "Scaling consensus: increasing decentralization in Wikipedia governance"

Much of this article is a sort of case study involving Wikipedia, however, a number of themes seem particularly relevant to designing new, successful Wikis: Decisions about content, even seemingly simple content, can cause controversy. How then, should more controversial content be approached? Despite the seeming challenges, content gets published without too many problems. Examine how governance changes over time. Governance refers to a system for organizing the rules that regulate behavior . However, there are formal and informal aspects to governance:

1. formal governance/law

2. social norms 3. the market 4. architecture/technology. All aspects contribute to controlling user behavior.

Eight design principles for self-organizing communities:

1. Congruence between rules and local conditions

2. Collective choice arrangements 3. Monitoring 4. Conflict-resolution mechanisms 5. Clearly defined community relationships 6. Graduated sanctions 7. Local enforcement of local rules 8. Multiple layers of nested enterprise

Wikipedia governance is less akin to rule imposition by external authority than to constant reform and refinement of social norms within the community. One clear obstruction to community-organized governance online is when users are not equipped with the technical powers required to perform acts of governance. Recommendation that "a virtual world need not be set up with a 'default' government, but can instead evolve one as needed." In Wikipedia, we find that code, policy, and social norms all support the wide distribution of power to govern. Policy making becomes more formal and slower as communities become larger. Original policy making tended to be more informal and quicker. There can be problems:

The problem of achieving consensus about content guidelines as the organization grows has led to a proliferation of small, decentralized social structures, such as WikiProjects

WikiProjects are most commonly organized around subject matter; however, many WikiProjects for specific tasks such as creating audio versions of articles (Spoken Wikipedia), or identifying and eliminating bias (WikiProject Countering systemic bias) also exist.

WikiProjects run into governance issues themselves when two or more projects claim that a particular article falls within their province or when there is a need to enforce local policy. Essentially, no governance mechanisms exist to address either of these situations directly and users employ the standard wiki process of discussion and consensus building. When it comes to local disputes, keeping up good relations with neighboring projects is important.

Some policies are simply "inherited" by the Wikipedia project from the Foundation, such as rules regarding copyright or rules to protect against legal or financial threat to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Eventually it was necessary to create a formal process and a kind of judicial body that could interpret official policy in the best interests of the project. (due to project size, complexity, other things)

-From Wikipedia to the Classroom: Exploring Online publication and learning This study was to investigate links between wiki publishing experiences and writing-to-learn. The study was directed towards a political writing course which gave astonishing results. The first section of the article took a look at the viewpoints of current wikipedians and discovered:

Wikipedians explicitly treat participation in Wikipedia s a learning experience. You have to learn in order to contribute knowledgeably to wikipedia. Features of knowledge building discourse is suggested to be the process for negotiating content proposing new ideas requesting evidence synthesizing divergent points of view

These different points of view create strong articles because each side insists the other have clear citations, although the process is messy (lot's of conflict) people are exposed to ideas and information that they wouldn't be otherwise. To get students motivated to write wikis and empower learning at the same time researchers suggested that authentic activities are a great impact these activities include:

personal disciplinary real world assessment

This was done to bridge the gap to create more authentic writing experiences for students. A pilot study with the political writing class was conducted and asked these questions: To what extent do students' interactions online affect their reasoning and writing? How does publishing influence students' beliefs about their writing and motivation to write well?

How does publishing influence the content and tone of students' writing? These results were mostly quantitatively measured at first counting average number of edits, page edits, resources contributed, evaluations written/received, and students who addressed at least 1 peer comment. Though these results only took account for activities on the wiki rather than outside where most of the students did their work and thought process so they conducted interviews with students who posted on the wiki these results were encountered:

student interactions helped improve their writing online wiki's are not always percieved as public. Perceived audience plays an important role in revision

The conclusion of this article lead to a new iteration of the study which decided to include more tools that were not previously available on current wikis. (teacher tools assessment and class management and a citation toolkit).

• Social Constructionism

Constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are actively making things in the real world. An important part of a Constructionism learning environment is the construction kit, or the tools in which the students use to create things (paper, crayon, computers, wikis) "Through writing, one comes to understanding"

-A History of Wiki in Education

The first use of a wiki in education was at Georgia Tech, in 1997 With the rise in popularity of Wikipedia, the idea of wikis in the class room have gained popularity Examples: http://www.curriki.org , http://www.wikibooks.org , http://www.wikiversity.org

"take advantage of the peer production model to create textbooks, course materials, curricula, classroom activities and other documents that can be used to organize educational activities." Wiki Extensions for Academic Writing ReferenceTools, references should be first class object in the system. They need to be an integral part in the article written. TeacherTools and StudentView, allowing students and teacher to view information about a course which is relevant to them Preliminary Observations It is difficult in a collaborative environment to see what students contributed and how much they contributed. This could easily be solved with versioning and diff algorithms " If teachers cannot assess collaborative wiki work, then we cannot expect wiki to be adopted for formal education, despite the potential learning gains for students. "

• Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing

Interview with 22 Wikipedians results:

The notion of credit exists in Wikipedia both as reward and as credibility that empowers individuals in the community. Although the culture forbids individuals from explicitly claiming authorship within an article it simply isn't done the technology provides indirect ways of establishing ownership. First, the editing history is available for every article, so it is possible to ascertain who created an article in the first place and to review each change to identify the most substantial contributions. Second, contributors often claim ownership of articles on their own user pages by creating lists of the articles for which they believe they ought to receive credit. Interviews revealed that Wikipedia authors recognize one another and often claim ownership of articles therefore the notion of authorship is still possible even though the articles are signed; most have been edited numerous times by numerous people. Wikipedians are not engaged in primary research. The encyclopedia-writing endeavor requires a different kind of credibility than scientific inquiry. For encyclopedists, it is important write well from multiple sources and reliably assesses those sources. These are the activities to which credibility in Wikipedia must be linked in order to sustain productive investments from members

• Self and School: Nurturing Students' Identities as Science Writers using Wikis

Education needs to go further than learning knowledge, it needs to become a force for self empowerment. Students view writing as a test for their knowledge rather than an opportunity to explore their logical thought process and build connections between their day to day lives. New generation wikis are a place of collaboration where more than the transfer of knowledge, it is a means to create difference in student's lives. In order to provide an environment in which students can pursue matters of personal interest, receive feedback from others, and think critically about the many online resources they already use, we are designing a wiki community that can supplement existing classroom activities. Students (and other community members) will author articles about science topics, evaluate online resources, and assess the work of peers as they build a public library of science resources. As a result of participating in this online community, we expect to find alterations in students' self-perceived roles with respect to learning and knowing in the sciences and a greater tendency to think critically about the information they find in a variety of online settings.

• Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on the Facebook

This article is about basically how students feel, and are affected about their professors being on Facebook. They did a two-year study, the first year (only the first year had been completed) surveyed students to see if their professors being on Facebook would influence the rating that they received or on how the students were affected, negatively or positively. They found that the ratings were not affected at all, they had thought that a more personal contact would perhaps gain the professors higher rating. Additionally, about a third of the students believed that the faculty shouldn't be on Facebook at all. Believing that it should be private and were worried the professors might see something they didn't want them to. Some of these students were not aware of the privacy options and may have not minded as much if they new the professors couldn't get to their page. A few reported that they did have some positive experience with being friends with their professor, and no one reported a negative one. This wasn't something I thought about that could influence people participating on wikis. If there is the option of creating a profile and the option of really expressing a lot of information about your self, maybe something like blogging, there would definitely have to be privacy options in place so people, such as students, children or employees, don't have to worry about others, such as professors, parents or bosses, seeing what they have said or contributed to in fear they may be judged and then have to pay some consequence for it. People should have the option to remain anonymous when contributing to the wiki. Of course if it is something that has to do with their business or maybe some serves that they provide then it wouldn't be necessary or even a good idea that they stay anonymous. But for the average user who just wants to express themselves, share their ideas or just add some information to a page then they shouldn't need to worry about the wrong people seeing their contributions.

• Empowering students: Wikis as a revolutionary force in education

In our education system students are taught to LEARN what is told to them, either by text books or by teachers. This one way transfer of knowledge creates a detached sense in students towards the efforts of authors. Wikis can change this fact as the website has history logs and enable students to be part of information CREATING and appreciate knowledge. Students have valuable knowledge to share and nothing less should be accepted from them. The design of the wiki needs to be around improving such collaboration and enabling students to experience the passion of knowledge production.

WorkToBeDone

Our goal is to further our research in order to determine which key components are required for our new wiki. In the end of our research we hope to have a display of what a "next Generation Wiki" might look like. The new features of the wiki will be based on successful traits that previous wikis have in addition to new traits that have never been used before but work well for some other type of collaboration (Microsoft Live Meeting ...) Instead of surveying students, we will use the data already gathered from numerous sources. With using these existing data we can expand our research more. We hope to program parts of the new wiki in order to better display it's features.

describe specific research emphasis of every member of your team

• Ben and Zaynab: Communication through wikis: Identifying various forms of communication and identify which works best
• Maryam: To design and actual structure of the wiki and study past designs to see where people contributed best
• Jacob: Studying success of failure of past wikis and identifying main factors involved
• Eryn: To examine how wikis give users the ability to express their ideas and knowledge
• Aaron: Researching Wiki's potential to support learning activities.

References

• Constructing text: wiki as a toolkit for (collaborative?) learning: Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2007)
• From Wikipedia to the classroom: exploring online publication and learning. Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2006)
• Why do people write for Wikipedia? Incentives to contribute to open-content publishing. Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2005)
• Self and school: nurturing students' identities as science writers using wikis: Amy Bruckman, Ph.D. and Andrea Forte, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute

of Technology.(2005)

• Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on Facebook. Hewitt, Anne and Andrea Forte. (2006)
• Empowering students: Wikis as a revolutionary force in education -Andrea Forte Wikimania (2006)

list any specific problems you have encountered and need feedback/guidance on

Potential areas for implementing wiki's in different learning environments would be helpful to ask questions about how wikis might be used by different demographics. There has been some conflicting data on what works best for collaboration in the articles we have read.