Wikis: Digital Grease boards

Welcome back, everyone and anyone.

Background and Philosophy

In a super-sweet book on personal connections in the digital age by Nancy K. Baym, called Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Dr. Baym argues for social constructivism, that social media platforms such as Facebook, last.fm, and Twitter are what we humans make them. (Baym, 2015). Wikis, when used by groups, become a de facto social media site, though it's a bit hazy because the wiki platform itself may not be where the intra-group discussion takes place. Still, constructivism fits collaborative learning with wikis.

Colleges, in a sense, have always been built around the social aspect of learning. Despite the classic image of the pontificating instructor, a secondary glance reminds us that universities have always been built around coming together, around discussion, around community. We might think that collaboration is new, but have you ever heard of "study groups"? Ever heard of the famous arguments among members of academia? Ever noticed how community-ist people get about their college alma mater, to the point where some people won't even date a person who attended the rival school?
Though I have not yet come across any research articles refuting or supporting this claim, I will say that it seems to me, 'lil ol' me, that pop culture perceives college as a guru-on-a-hill situation because that's easy to dramatize in entertainment media and because, well, if you study something long enough, you like talking about it, so there undoubtedly have been course instructors who droned on endlessly.

So, now that you've had some adieu, I shall go no further with it.

Grease Board Drama

Wikis are a tool. Most of us have seen media where the scholars in question write long equations on grease boards. In an episode of "The Big Bang Theory", Leslie, a tangential rival of Sheldon's, changes an equation on his dry-erase board at home. Sheldon, being Sheldon, is furious despite the fact that she "fixed the problem [he] was having." This calls to mind a chief fear that new Wiki-worker-onners have... they're afraid that they'll screw up someone else's work. (West & West, 2009). However, this trepidation aside, generally allayed by the fact that wikis allow you to see prior versions and revert if necessary (I am a data point to confirm the fear-to-allayance progression, by the way... Had it with my first wiki in the "Characteristics of the Adult Learner" class).
So, to make this ranking of pros and cons fun, drawing on my personal experience with wikis as a user, and taking a speculative stab at how I feel about the prospect of using them as a chorus director and/or future college course facilitator, here we go on features of Wikis. I don't want to just call these traits strictly pros or cons because, as in the anecdote above, a perception of goodness or badness may just be based on selective endpoints. This is to say, I might think it's bad today, but time might change my mind. Further, the lens of learner and facilitator is very different.

So, in this scaling, my value is on longterm retention for the learner and enjoyment factor for, and this is key, my personal guess at how I will/would feel about this trait of using wikis as an instructor. Note the very strong difference in these factors. Put bluntly, I'm using wikis to facilitate learning, how much sacrifice of personal enjoyment would I be making to use Wiki? The student learning is the reason for the job, so that comes first, but one does want to like the gig.

If a trait gets a positive score, it's a net pro, and vice versa.

Wiki traits -

Clarity of Grading Expectations in a Collaborative Project: 0. The whole prospect of grading shared content is murky for the learner and the instructor, but K-State facilitators Dr. Collins and Dr. Kang navigated it nicely. We were asked how much our group members contributed, and this helped determine the overall grade. However, I'll be blunt. It's nice to get a good grade, and I deeply appreciate the instructor's feedback, but if I contribute to the group with my whole heart and get a B instead of an A, it just means I have more room to grow. Part of learning is learning how to work.

Creativity Flexibility: +4. It's been super-fun-times making wikis. I think, as an instructor, I'd really like to see more than text and pictures. Makes memes, write jokes, tell how the learning affects you personally. I think I'd have a hard time getting students to come out of their shell.

Appearance of Wikis: -2. Similar to printed books without pictures, ya gotta spruce these things up, and you gotta organize them well. It's hard when you're worried about showing that you've learned something to also put the audience first, treating the whole project like a presentation for communication rather than simple show-and-tell. Being frank, on the whole, I think we students could be better in making our wikis visually appealing.

Learning Retention: +3. It's been about 6 months since I did my first wiki. The strongest thing I remember is how much fun it was to work with my cohorts. All 3 ladies were so nice and supportive. For my one-person wiki for Curriculum Design, I think the learning was very strong. Having to process the info is super key. I think out loud/as I write, so it's very good for me. I remember a fair bit learning about Gilligan and her work. I remember really zoning in to do my part, reading primary sources and such, to hold up my part of the project.

Ease of use: +3. I actually find Wikis challenging. But, I came to grad school to be challenged. As a leader and facilitator, it appears to me that emotionally-charged situations stay in the mind better; this is part of why music is such a great way to teach.

Overall, then, as you see, I give Wikis a +10. They are not the be-all-end-all of online and collaborative learning, but they are a nice tool to use. I plan to seek ways to incorporate using Wiki into my chorus... Which, as you see hinted at in the meme above, should be a high-road transfer (Foley & Kaiser, 2013) for my guys in the sense that they are used to collaborative learning, even if doing so digitally might be new. I will work to show them the advantages, while mitigating the disadvantages, of the internet's grease-board.
References:
Baym, N. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed). Malden, MA: Polity
Foley, J. & Kaiser, A. (2013). Learning transfer and its intentionality in adult and continuing education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 137. 5-15.
West, J. & West, M. (2009). Using Wikis for online collaboration: The power of the read-write Web. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass