The technology affordances of personal wikis in higher education

Peter McDowellSchool of Education

Charles Darwin University

peter.mcdowell@cdu.edu.au

Learning Management Systems

• Self-contained, virtual learning environments (VLEs)

• Branded, customised, and quality-controlled

• Centralised administration (enrolment, assessment, and certification)

• Heightened security and academic integrity

• Facilities to help diagnose the ‘student experience’

• Commercial consultancy and support

A case for LMS alternatives

• Higher education students often require more exposure to more technology than is offered through their institution’s LMS

• Students’ informal experiences with relevant technologies (e.g. Web 2.0) are often superior to those accessed through their institution’s LMS

• Common examples: social networking tools, community forums, weblogs, wikis

Educational use of wikis

• Collaborative emphasis

• Accrual of socially acceptable content

• Linking of coherent, internally consistent material

• Tendency to anonymise contributions

• Versioning downplays learners’ approximations

Repurposing wikis

• Structuring diverse sources of information

• Making connections with prior learning

• Considering alternative interpretations

• Modelling complex situations

• Managing knowledge acquisition

Personal wikis

• Emphasise the information handling potential of wikis (the repurposing)

• Harness (where appropriate) the collaborative benefits of wikis

Research questions

• How suitable are personal wikis as an LMS alternative?

• What are the technology affordances of personal wikis in higher education?

Gaver’s theory of affordances

• Developing the idea of an affordance as the potential for an artefact to become involved in human activity

• Stresses the importance of analysing the interdependence of artefacts, humans, and the information available to systems of perception (especially at the human-machine interface)

Gaver’s theory of affordances

False Affordance

Perceptible Affordance

Correct Rejection

Hidden Affordance

Perceptible?

Aff

ord

an

ce?

No Yes

No

Yes

Educational context

•Students’ self-rated reaction when needing to use some new technology (at entry)

Prior exposure

•Students’ prior knowledge and experience of using wikis (at entry)

Revised research question

• Do personal wikis have any specific technology affordances:

• that might promote positive student interest in technological exploration?

• that might enhance pre-service teachers’ awareness of the advantages of technology-enhanced learning?

Specific requirements

• Large cohort (370+)

• Large proportion of external students (83%+)

• Online and offline access (remote students)

• Able to integrate easily with existing LMS (Blackboard Learn)

• Develop students’ digital literacies

UnaMesa’s TiddlyWiki

An assessment wiki

Embedded course material

Support for assessment

Perceptible affordances

• Course package

• Micro-content (‘tiddlers’)

• Hyperlinking (deliberate and automatic)

• Extensible (programming of additional features)

• Embedded assessment

Hidden affordances

• Able to trace students’ work practices, learning, and contributions through the timeline

• Support for reflective journalling

False affordances

• Downloading the file required before opening

• File versioning (timestamped backup files are made prior to update)

Novel affordances

• Support for transclusion

• Transclusion is a crucial aspect of Theodor Nelson’s notion of hypertext

• Linking sends the reader elsewhere

• Hyperlinks should also be two-way

• Transclusion brings content from elsewhere to the reader (blended into the present context)

Xanalogical Structure

Source: http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm

Concluding the unit

•Students’ self rating on the proposition “I am a literate producer of hypertext” (at exit)

Complex objects

• Place considerable demands on human agency

• Encourage active exploration

• Students’ exploration of the affordances leads to discovery of the system (a hidden affordance)

• The reverse does not hold: awareness of the system does not mean that the affordances are perceptible

Implications

• Potential for formal and informal learning (ubiquitous learning)

• Supporting a richer notion of hypertext promotes conceptual modelling and general systems thinking

• Hypertext pedagogy is still emerging

• Further research is needed on the interplay between learning through complex objects (in this case, personal wikis) and student assessment

Thank you.peter.mcdowell@cdu.edu.au