playing well with others and other skill sets that I should work on
Recently my friend Travis created a wiki to keep track of his City of Heroes (and City of Villains) characters. Naturally I gave him shit for failing to create the wiki as a joint effort.* Who STARTED him playing City of Heroes, anyway? It was my class assignment;** he jumped on my bandwagon. And who made the original GoogleDoc spreadsheets that let us keep track of what level characters we had on which servers, hm?
When I created those spreadsheets, I originally made them for my characters only, of course. I was going to grant read-only access to my CoX buddies so that they could see at a glance what I had available for teams of various levels, but then it turned out that read-only access on GoogleDocs doesn’t let you sort, which seemed fairly important for the purpose of quickly finding a level ~10 scrapper for a team, so I made them collaborative–which had the added advantage of allowing all of us to list our available characters in one place, even if I frequently forget to update when I level up.
It’s pretty easy to keep a spreadsheet sensible, even with multiple authors. There were fields for character name, server, level, class, and powersets. It was a simple structure and it didn’t need any tweaking. Wikis, on the other hand, grow quickly and in many cases incomprehensibly without a pretty strict template. Editing wikipedia, I’ve encountered this even with minor edits of my own on entries concerning my favorite traditional folk song, Child ballad #10 (the sister-killing song). People don’t like bits of structure on the page–headings about alternative variants. Some people apparently do not like calling anything a “variant” of such a folk song, and other people think that the structure of the page should match other pages. There was some argument on the talk page, the last time I looked, about what exactly a “variant” is and why the last editor (me) was wrong to use the term.
I found this annoying. For one thing, I hate being gainsaid; for another, I hate the sneaking suspicion that I am not adequately equipped to participate in a particular discourse. In the course I took this past semester on collaborative learning, we read a piece by Cress & Kimmerle (2007) that explicitly considered how people use wikis and what motivates them to participate, postulating that the major motivation is that people find a discrepancy between their own knowledge structure and that of the wiki, and are motivated to bring the two into synch by contributing to the wiki. It wasn’t really discussed, however, what people do when they know that they know something that isn’t included in the current wiki knowledge structure, but don’t really know how to go about conveying it.
Wikis, despite many of my colleagues’ impression of them as unlawful, Wild West-ish virtual spaces where anything goes, are very norm-bound. If you don’t edit them right your edits are likely to be absorbed past all recognition. There has to be another push for a person to feel motivated to learn the norms in order to edit at all, which I suspect might come from the critical mass of a LOT of knowledge discrepancies, all of which could be righted by the reader if they were confident that they had a grip on the norms for doing so. Having only felt particularly motivated myself to add known recordings of Child #10 to the relevant pages, I’m not really there yet for wikipedia (and of course, there are some kinds of knowledge that you can probably add without understanding the norms, as when expanding a list).
With a new wiki, though, there’s a different set of problems, which is that everyone enters them with some idea of what a wiki, or this particular wiki, should look like, and in my experience there isn’t much explicit discussion of those norms. I’ve done wikis for several courses now, as well as participated in a few recreational small wikis such as Travis’s CoX site, and the most frequent issue that seems to arise is one of, at least from my viewpoint, people just dumping things every which way like they’re making notes for a prelim or something similarly not meant for the eyes or comprehension of others.
This is how it looks from MY perspective. No doubt from the perspectives of others I am equally irrational and opaque in my organizational preferences, but I’m not psychic. I just know how it looks from in here. It’s possible that we tend to assume too much common understanding once we determine that everyone knows, basically, what a “wiki” is. None of the courses I’ve been in spent any time developing any kind of template, which might have ultimately saved us a lot of frustration.
Another issue, which might stem from (perceived) distribution of labor, is related to collaboration or the lack thereof. Other class wiki participants have noted that some people are not as interested in collaboration as others, and don’t seem to get the basic idea that a wiki is a collaborative work in which particular individual contributions generally disappear. More subtly, it seems like some people don’t think about the need for iterative collaborative work in the context of a wiki–it’s not enough to just dump some information; you actually need to integrate it into what’s there, or check back periodically to see how it’s being integrated by others. Collaborative authorship only works if people really keep working together, keep contributing, keep adding and editing and revising to create a truly collaborative product.
It seems likely that certain teams are going to be better at this than others. Some people were probably not meant to be co-authors. Some people are probably better at collaboration in general, but there is also a quality of partnership in collaborative work like wikis or, more traditionally, co-authored papers. You’re never going to get a perfect team out of a randomly assigned class of people, but it might help to make course wikis truly semester-long endeavors to encourage the development of collaborative practices in groups that might not necessarily have a knack for them at the start. Starting later and asking people to synthesize previously collected material doesn’t really seem to encourage the kind of collaborative creation that course wikis are intended to promote.
Despite my own natural resistance to surrendering authorial control, it can be very satisfying to see a wiki page develop into something bigger than I could or would have created on my own. It’s like those “magic rocks” that grow into colorful stalagmites. Except with knowledge.
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*Don’t worry, he let me in, if for no other reason than to stop my whining.
**One person remarked at the time that assigning an MMOG to students in a course on virtual worlds was kind of like assigning pharmacology students a heroin addiction.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Hmm. A series of very good points re: wikis. I’ve not yet had the pleasure(?) of starting my own wiki projects. I have a very good one about a wiki history of my college. Basically ever since it went co-ed, the College has been trying to rewrite the history of the school. In an effort to document the experienced history of RMWC, I wanted to start a wiki. I looked into it, but I never got it going. Grad school seems to do that to a lot of projects that don’t have papers and therefore potential publications/conference presentations at the end. However, it is an interesting sociology of knowledge question, and so I briefly considered starting the wiki, and as a condition of editorship, an agreement to be interviewed about the knowledge process. Then I decided that was skeevy. Hmm.
I do want to use wikis in the classroom. Blackboard now has a relatively usable wiki feature. I was thinking that it could be a “study-guide” for the kids: that each topic in class, they would have to create a wiki from their text, reader, and classnotes to create a comprehensive study guide.
Anyway, this was a very useful entry. Thanks