Consider how the group collaboration and discussion within the wiki space differed from what you are accustomed to in a standard threaded discussion space (like the one we’ve been using throughout the course in WebCT Vista). What kinds of advantages do you see in using wikis for group collaboration? What are some of the challenges of working with others in a collaborative wiki space?
Reflections on using the wiki as a classroom vs threaded discussions
I find using the wiki as a collaborative space both challenging and rewarding. I’ve used wikis in both synchronous and asynchronous situations and in a large group (this class – 25, I believe) and in a small group (4 of us working on a group project for 512). How well it works depends in part on what kind of conditions it is being used under.
My own experience says that small-group-synchronous works better than larger-group-asynchronous. In part, this is because a group the size of ours is just large enough for us to feel constrained about editing each other. Even in a small group, it is difficult to step up and edit other people’s work, for fear of giving offense. A huge-scale project like Wikipedia avoids some of these issues (although not all, as the controversy on Michael Jackson’s death showed this week – see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273277-93.html for a brief report of the controversy.) But in a smaller group, particularly if you’re working synchronously, it is easier to ask permission to edit, or to edit with the right spirit. Because I’m trained as an editor (although I’m now the lunching kind of editor, not the spelling-and-grammar kind of editor) and because of the environment I work in, editing is second nature. It is also something you get a very thick skin about very quickly, or you don’t survive. My experience with authors – even with experienced authors – is that this isn’t the case among the general population. So when I’m operating in an environment like the wiki we used this week, I do try to be careful. I’ll be curious to see how constrained my classmates felt or didn’t feel about editing.
Two further observations: I find it difficult to come to an assignment with the list already made, which is one of the difficulties with working asynchronously. A list that is already made creates invisible parameters around one’s thinking, so that it becomes harder to think creatively about the assignment. I found that my response was to tinker with wording rather than contribute original thoughts. Without an immediate conversation to create the background, I found it difficult to sort through whether our five suggestions were sufficiently differentiated.
Finally, in this week’s example, I think we missed the boat (myself included!) by failing to connect our discussion to our lists of 5. We commented on each others’ sightings, but not in any particular depth, in part because of the physical arrangement, with sightings on one page and discussion on the next – learning to quickly move back and forth is likely something that takes practice. It was also more difficult than in a threaded discussion to create a sense of conversation – we simply added comments to a scroll, so it was harder to create the comment-and-response that you get in a threaded discussion. Blogs would have a significant advantage here, as you can comment directly on a particular posting, which has the advantage of gathering all of the ‘like’ comments in one place, creating the back and forth of a conversation.
References:
McCullagh, D., ‘Michael Jackson’s death roils Wikipedia’ CNET News, 25 June 2009, retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273277-93.html
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