Wiki source code of Final Report - Class Wiki 2.0

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  1: *Title:* Final Report - Class Wiki 2.0
  2: 
  3: *Authors:* #sign("XWiki.cilked"), #sign("XWiki.clarkm"), #sign("XWiki.ScottKeller"), #sign("XWiki.yorki")
  4: 
  5: *Abstract:* Wikis are a part of our everyday lives and a great way of spreading information; however, how can we better align the xwiki tools and educational practices to enhance participation and foster collaboration.
  6: 
  7: *Keywords:* wiki, collaboration, education, classroom, community, usability
  8: 
  9: *Statement of the Problem:*\\
 10: After exploring learning support systems related to Sketch-up, we decided instead to focus on the class wiki and identify enhancements that may help facilitate both digital and social system participation. Our goal has been to build upon the successes of the current class wiki and expand the overall utility of the wiki for future classes. By reviewing the current systems, as well as related class practices, we determined four areas around which we could develop wiki-related technology and exercises:
 11: 
 12: * Individuality versus collaboration in content authorship
 13: * Creativity versus consistency in content creation and display
 14: * Page verses meta views in content awareness and navigation
 15: * Directed versus spontaneous group formation around class topics
 16: 
 17: Our understanding of the issues has changed over time as we have explored the current literature and uncovered various implementation difficulties. Because we are working within the pre-developed framework of the XWiki software, we've made some pragmatic compromises with our original designs, while still maintaining the goal of improved wiki utility.
 18: 
 19: *Rationale:*\\
 20: Our class wiki provides an immediate example of the interplay between digital and social systems. As wikis provide a content-neutral platform for groups to create, review, and edit content, the substance of a wiki directly reflects the social practices of the contributors. When used in a classroom, a wiki provides a unique opportunity to explore the challenges and complexities of digital and social collaboration.
 21: 
 22: For clarity, a wiki is usually defined as a collection of web pages designed to allow anyone to contribute or edit.  Wikis differ from more traditional web sites in that the content creation and revision is more distributed in time and contributors, and in that the page creation process is often greatly simplified requiring only a web browser. These differences create new dynamics around the wiki content allowing for collaboration during construction of information and understanding. Interest in using a wiki in the classroom often centers on these collaborative and constructive possibilities.
 23: 
 24: Of course, the presence of a wiki does not immediately transform a classroom into a collaborative environment. Years of classroom experiences, for both teachers and students, can work to predefine or limit the possibilities of a wiki. Often times, class wikis end up acting simply as educator directed content management systems, helping to simply administer handouts and assignments. However, when consciously leveraged, wikis may act as a fulcrum point around which both social and technological practices can be pivoted towards greater collaboration.
 25: 
 26: Classrooms differ from many wiki environments in that the assessment process can direct individuals to differing modes of participation and help guide an exploration of the technical and social uses of a class wiki. Most public wikis depend on the willingness of individuals to participate and, like many social web tools, can struggle to maintain an active community. Classrooms naturally provide that community of interest, although perhaps only for a limited time, as compared to public wikis. By using assessment as the leverage, teachers can use the wiki to guide students to explore various possibilities for participation over the duration of the class.  
 27: 
 28: However, wikis also allow for students to help direct class practices as well through a greater potential for interaction, communication, and coordination. Students can more easily view the contributions of their peers, which can allow them to find exemplars of current and past work, build upon peer contributions, even redirect assignments entirely when class consensus emerges. This greater awareness of peer actions provided by the wiki plays a direct role developing norms for the class regarding mode and degree of participation, as well as depth and style of content. 
 29: 
 30: Through the interplay of both teacher and student actions, class practices must evolve to provide direction and purpose to a wiki. While a strictly hands-off, ethnographic approach can help research how a class might choose to use a wiki, the constant competition for the time of teachers and students in an academic environment can quickly deprioritize wiki work regardless of the interest level. Directing wiki work through structured activities and assessment can help establish a foundation of familiarity and help outline the options for a class to better explore the domain of digital and social systems.
 31: 
 32: *Relationship to the Course:*\\
 33: 
 34: While wikis are flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of uses, there are four areas for which we considered how to develop both technological and social practices. Each of these areas relates to several themes of the class including: e-education, usability, mega-creativity, constructivism, user-centered design, collaboration, and communities of interest/practice.
 35: 
 36: __Individuality versus collaboration in content authorship:__\\ 
 37: In the purest sense, wikis are considered ego-less as the content is created and revised by a number of individuals. This practice of page creation is often termed DocumentMode, where the page content is emphasized over the page authorship. DocumentMode is often contrasted with ThreadMode, where the content consists of individual statements by single authors that takes the form of a running dialog. In between these extremes are various mixed approaches, such as blogs, where a single author provides a page on which other can comment but not revise, or opinion pages focused on the same topic but designed to emphasize the view of an individual or small group. The addition of a message board to the wiki allows for class exercises that could explore these authorship differences by having the entire class edit a single page on a topic and also engage in a threaded discussion regarding the same topic. The final results as well as the process for each approach can be compared for benefits and drawbacks. As contrasted to blogs or opinion pages, both of these exercises require individuals to be more fully aware of the contribution of others and may allow for greater depth and breadth of analysis by reducing redundant contributions. These exercises allow for everyone to explore a variety of authorship and collaboration practices and help guide agreement around a set of community norms.  
 38: 
 39: __Creativity versus consistency in content creation and display:__\\
 40: While wikis allow for content editing by most members, changing the overall design of the site is most often restricted to administrators. This restriction lends a visual consistency to most wikis, which has both positive and negative consequences. One might argue that a stable design helps orient users and unifies disparate content while others may insist that a static design limits creative expression and may not accommodate users' needs or desires. Our consideration of design possibilities ranged between the extremes of Consistency and Creativity with several blended options based on site, page, and individual preferences. The Xwiki software offers skinning and side panel capabilities that could allow a class to explore these design issues, although implementing design changes are not simple. However, the design process could allow the class to consider ways to better facilitate the contributions of wiki design elements in distributed manner similar to the contributions of wiki content. Exercises might include the collaborative setup/creation of several designs and class discussions focusing on the various pros and cons of the process and results. Further considerations can include when user preferences should trump page or site preferences. The interaction between the creation of a highly creative page design, for either a group or individual, and the end-user's design-related desires or limitations, such as red-green color blindness, provide a rich ground for researching both technical and social practices related to usability and mega-creativity.
 41: 
 42: __Page verses meta views in content awareness and navigation:__\\
 43: Tagging is a common activity in Web 2.0 technologies and provides a method for users to group pages around a related topic. The resulting organization is often based on a folksonomy, or collection of user-created terms that provide an decentralized taxonomy. Tags can also be autogenerated from the content of a page similar to the devlopment of a search index. While automation can help boot-strap the creation of an initial folksonomy, the autotags may be overly specific and not adequately reflect the meta themes of the content as compared to user-generated tags. Tags are often displayed in a word cloud, which encodes the popularity of a tag by its relative size and provides a link to a list of pages with that tag. As such, word clouds act both as flexible indexes and convenient navigation elements of the meta themes of a wiki. Potential exercises include exploring how word clouds can be enhanced by additional encodings such as clustering by concept, ordering by levels of recent activity (as opposed to overall usage), or coloring by number of contributors (as opposed to number of pages) and how this affects site awareness and navigation. Related exercises include assigning individuals or teams to tag a set of related documents, such as those for an assignment, to create an area specific summation that can be compared/contrasted both with each other as well as with the underlying pages as differing approaches to constructing understanding. The site folksonomy can also be periodically reviewed and revised for consistency and completeness as further exploration into how individuals and groups can build shared meaning. 
 44: 
 45: __Directed versus spontaneous group formation around topics:__\\
 46: While wikis allow nearly anyone to contribute content, the formation of an active community often depends on  an awareness and understanding of the contributing individuals and their interests and motivations. Within a wiki this information primarily resides on a user's profile that is commonly established when first joining a wiki. Often these profiles are unstructured, which allows users to contribute as much, or as little, as they choose. Greater possibilities for community building can arise from a semi-structured profile design that helps categorize information for easier comparison and helps direct group formation strategies. Within a classroom, the profile could be expanded to include academic details such as major, year, interests, motivation, and skills as well as social information such as home town, hobbies, and favorite books, movies, games, etc. This information can help develop a richer community by allowing members to find topics of common interest, or by facilitating ice-breaker sessions to promote discussion and interaction. Detailed profiles can be further utilized in directed group formation strategies such as the DeBono six-hats method. Common in academia and industry, the six-hats method details six modes of thinking for group discussions and assigns to each a color:
 47: 
 48: * Neutrality (white): Listing facts and data
 49: * Feeling (red): Utilizing intuition and feelings
 50: * Positive (yellow): Detailing advantages and benefits
 51: * Negative (black): Determining flaws and risks
 52: * Creative (green): Seeking investigation and alternatives
 53: * Process (blue): Considering process and organization
 54: 
 55: While six-hats allows for role playing that separates ego from task and encourages both lateral and full-spectrum thinking, it can also be used to assess an individual's tendency for each mode of thinking. This thinking mode assessment could added as a visual summary to a structured wiki profile to help cluster individuals with similar tendencies and potentially define related wiki roles. One possible exercise could be to have the class collaborate on a wiki-based analysis of a paper, where the contribution requirements are assigned to groups defined by their thinking mode. White hat thinkers might focus on an accurate summary of the material, while yellow, black, and red hat thinkers determine the benefits, risks, and subjective issues respectively. Thinkers with green hat tendencies could focus on creating new alternatives to address the issues identified and blue hat thinkers would help coordinate the overall process. This direction can ease the process of collaboration by aligning roles with the strengths of each individual and by guiding interactions through the wiki. Six-hats is also used prescriptively to define role-playing that can be used in class exercises to allow everyone to contribute to each role, regardless of their general preferences. A possible class exercise along these lines would be to generate ideas for final projects. The sequence could be to have the entire class work in white hat mode to define the assignment requirements, then shift to green hat mode to generate many ideas that meet those criteria. Each project idea would be assessed for benefits and risks through yellow and black hat activities respectively. Red hat activities allow for individuals to assert their preferences and feelings about each project, while blue hat activities would be used throughout to organize the process. The resulting list might allow individuals to more easily form communities of interest and the six-hats assessment serves as both a starting point for the group as well a shared background for the entire class that enhances further project presentations and discussions. Ultimately, both spontaneous and directed group formation options are enhanced through the use of structured and detailed profiles to help foster collaboration opportunities and engage the symmetry of knowledge/ignorance between individuals.
 56: 
 57: *Contribution of Team Members and Implementation:*\\
 58: __Dain Cilke focused on the implementation of wiki design options and how to balance content creativity, customization, and consistency.__\\
 59: In order to fully utilize the wiki, the content structure and design has to be specifically tuned.  The layout, color and navigation all play a role in facilitating interaction and maximizing the efficiency of the user.  The first step pursued in the reformatting involved changing the layout of the wiki.  I settled on a single panel design.  Using the xwiki's built in skinning and panel management abilities, I eliminated all unnecessary panels.  The idea behind this decision was to determine the use of the various panels of the wiki by its users.  Scrapping all but the essential panels would allow the most user feedback in terms of what they actually miss.  However, I couldn't fully judge reactions of the students because the xwiki was changed back to reduce any inconsistency or hindrance of use.  However, I was able to change the color of the wiki.  Instead of having to look at a grey scale screen, I thought color would encourage use in the wiki.  If the wiki was pleasant to look at, then facilitating interaction would be that much easier.  I chose a color that would be easy on the eyes (therefore no neon colors) and would stimulate the response centers in the brain.  From personal experience, I have found a brown color to be calming while increasing my focus.  However, this change, like most of the changes I made were based more on what I thought would be best for the wiki.  In order to make effective changes, a study would have to be conducted, trying various combinations of layouts and color schemes to determine what would be the most effective for a particular group.  Finally, if I were continuing this study I would look into the effects of having user customizable views of the wiki.  Instead of forcing one look on all users, I would try to allow each user to view the wiki with whatever skin they enjoy the most.\\
 60: 
 61: __Matt Clark worked on implementing page tagging and word clouds to help visualize activity around a theme.__\\
 62: Tag clouds support both information retrieval and community building.  A tag cloud supports pull technology, by allowing fast querying of tags, as well as push technology, as a tag can be subscribed to via RSS, or a similar technology.{pre}&#91;Hassan-Montero&#93;{/pre}  Tagging also lowers the effort required to contribute to a site, which builds community by involving a greater number of users in contributing to the site. {pre}&#91;Muriso&#93;{/pre} This aspect of community building is not as relevant in a classroom setting, as students can be required to contribute to the website, but the tag cloud still encourages community by allowing students to quickly see tags related to the other students work.  The tag cloud therefore serves as an advertisement to encourage students to read the work of their classmates. Most students will not spend much time reading other students' work, due to time constraints, but the use of the tag cloud can make reading other work easier.
 63: \\
 64: 
 65: With help from Holger Dick, I added the community tag section to the class wiki.  It aggregates the tags assigned to a document in a simple tag cloud, where tags are sorted alphabetically, and are emphasized by their frequency of use.  This straightforward implementation is not the only choice for a tag cloud.  Research into tagging shows that clouds can be improved by adding a formula which emphasizes tags on a combination of their frequency of use and their usefulness, and by adding clustering algorithms (such as the K-means algorithm) to clouds, which create groups of semantically similar tags. 
 66: {pre}&#91;Hassan-Montero&#93;{/pre} With clustering, tags are grouped together if they co-occur in 
 67: multiple documents, which results in tags with similar meanings being grouped together. The resulting tag cloud is easier to use for information retrieval. The next step in this research would be to implement an automatic tagging system which adds the tags to the cloud as documents are saved in the Wiki, or ask students to tag their documents as they create them. It would also be interesting to extend the tag cloud to additional spaces for additional classes.  If more classes adopt electronic collaborative environments, perhaps the tag cloud could start to encompass the entire university, rather than a single class, or a single department.
 68: \\
 69: 
 70: __Scott Keller implemented the Message Board which can help explore the differences between creating documents and developing discussions as methods of content creation and display.__\\
 71: Just as traditional communities require a vehicle for participation, virtual communities require a system that supports the exchange of electronic information among members. {pre}&#91;Moore&#93;{/pre} In our wiki implementation, community interaction and discussion was severely lacking stemming from a few key design issues:
 72: 
 73: * Assignment Posting Format and Bulk of Information
 74: * Load times
 75: * Discussion Format
 76: 
 77: ~~Assignment posting format and Bulk of Information~~\\
 78: The assignments that were posted were relatively large amounts of text from a browsing standard. Users did not want to individually open each student response and read through a block of text to retrieve information. In fact, due to the nature of the assignments, many responses were repetitive rehashes of the same information. In addition, the content of the assignments was very decentralized. Each student response became a separate page, which due to page load times, made browsing difficult and led to a loss of interest quickly.
 79: 
 80: ~~Load times~~\\
 81: In any virtual community, satisfactory system response time is generally viewed as a necessary requirement. {pre}&#91;Koh&#93;{/pre} For most of the semester, the wiki was very slow and cumbersome. Due to sluggish page load times, very few users were motivated to create content outside of the predefined assignment pages, browse others completed works, comment, or flesh out their profiles. Most of the class emphasis was placed on classroom lectures and discussions creating a stagnant online community. When the quality of the IT infrastructure is low, well-organized offline events are more important for stimulating the community. {pre}&#91;Koh&#93;{/pre}
 82: 
 83: ~~Discussion Format~~\\
 84: The wiki had tools in place to comment on pages. However, It became apparent that these tools were not by any means perfect. Discussion forums were attached to specific pages allowing users to be engaged within the context of what they are viewing. {pre}&#91;Girgensohn&#93;{/pre} Since the discussions were page specific, discussion on a topic would be hidden in one group's assignment response. This coupled with the fact that the discussion was hidden unless clicked on, and the slow page load speed, led to single post comments with usually no replies.
 85: 
 86: In response to these issues, I found that creation of a centralized message board system would help address the communication problem. Internet Forums focus on sharing information, forming and maintaining relationships and identity, and giving and receiving emotional support. {pre}&#91;Moore&#93;{/pre} With the help of Holger Dick, I implemented basic board which allowed admin controlled categories, and user created topics and threads. With the board up, I was eager to see how the community would utilize it. Unfortunately, the board has remained barren. When the message board was first created, I neglected to set the permissions correctly and only users with administrative access were allowed to post. This problem could have been easily fixed but I was not informed until about a week later when I received an email. I thought that the fix would lead to a greater amount of posting but the boards have yet to expand. The board would need to have been operational at the beginning of the class and integrated into its activity. Virtual community activity (such as posting or viewing)is directly affected by individual members' needs(usefulness) and experience (offline interaction). {pre}&#91;Koh&#93;{/pre} By the time the board was up, there were no more assignments to stimulate discussion and therefore no incentive to view and create content. Without the want or need to initialize discussions, it was impossible for the board to get off the ground. Message boards and online communities in general cannot thrive without useful content and interested members. 
 87: 
 88: __Ian York focused on the analysis framework and ideas for rich profiles and group formation strategies.__\\
 89: I developed much of the framework for analysis through researching wiki concepts and related discussions, academic papers on classroom wiki uses, and potential group formation strategies. I also spent some time probing the limitations of the Xwiki software to help determine possibilities for user-specific design and the Lucene search index as a possible word cloud source. Overall, I've played the role of coordinator for our group, attempting to herd the cats by detailing responsibilities and time lines and providing testing and feedback for the implementation efforts. Given another year, I would try to utilize the expanded wiki technology and proposed class activities to test if these ideas actually lead to greater participation, collaboration, and understanding around the class material. While I believe the theories are reasonably grounded in current research, directing group activities around technology always offer unforeseen and unique challenges related to the specifics of the individuals and tools involved.
 90: 
 91: *References:*\\
 92: 
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103: Deibel, K. (2005). Team Formation Methods for Increasing Interaction During in-class Group Work. Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education 2005. Caparica, Portugal. 291-295. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1151954.1067525
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107: Hassan-Montero, Y., and Herrero-Solana, V., Improving tag-clouds as visual information retrieval interfaces, InScit2006: International Conference on Multidisciplinary Information Sciences and Technologies, 2006. http://nosolousabilidad.com/hassan/improving&#95;tagclouds.pdf 
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109: Jensen, D. and Feland,J., Bowe, M., Self, B. A 6-Hats based team formation strategy: Development and comparison with an MBTI based approach. In Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference, 2000. http://www.usafa.af.mil/df/dfem/research&#95;info/ed&#95;research/6hats.pdf
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111: Koh, Joon, Young-Gul Kim, Brian Butler, and Gee-Woo Bock. "Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities." COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 50 (2007): 68-73
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124: Reinhold, S. and Abawi, D.F., Concepts for Extending Wiki Systems to Supplement Collaborative Learning, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3942 (2006), pp. 755-767. http://www.springerlink.com/content/1n5r7763285hr553/fulltext.pdf
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