Collaborative writing with wikis

Here is a short summary of the main research project I am currently working with:

Background

Collaborative writing is considered an important activity in a large variety of professional work. Recently, the widespread use of social media has also increased the amount of writing in social interaction. In addition academic collaborative writing projects have emerged. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is especially interesting because of the large amount of contributors from all over the world. The success of this massive online project seems to challenge popular definitions of collaborative writing which have focused on a limited amount of writers (Lowry et al. 2004, Posner and Baecker 1992).

Goal 

Based on these new trends, I will develop a comprehensive model of collaborative writing which attempts to integrate these new writing trends from the internet. Inspired by a sociocultural perspective (Castelló et al. 2012; Prior 2006) and recent theoretical development within the research field CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning)(Järvelä and Hadwin 2013; Kirschner and Erkens 2013), I will establish a multilevel framework that describes writing activities at four different levels: individual, small group, community and massive global scale.

Method

The theoretical discussion will be based on data from a case study in Norwegian teacher education. In the spring term 2012, approximately 25 students were required to use a wiki to do three collaborative writing assignments in a course about educational use of ICT. Students met face-to-face one or two times a week during period of one month. In these evening sessions a rich variety of data was collected: video data, audio data and individual screen capture data. In addition students were interviewed in groups after they had finished their assignments.

In the data analysis I will give a detailed description of how the students collaborated. Discourse data will be used to analyze the interaction and the language use. I will use screen capture data to analyze the evolvement of collective text artifacts during the course. I will also describe the tensions that arise when students write together in new ways which don’t necessarily fit with the cultural expectations of what is considered “good academic writing”.

References

 - Castelló, M., Bañales, G., & Vega, N. A. (2010). Research approaches to the regulation of academic writing: the state of the question. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 8(3), 1253-1282.

 - Järvelä, S., & Hadwin, A. F. (2013). New frontiers: Regulating learning in CSCL. Educational Psychologist, 48(1), 25-39.

 - Kirschner, P. A., & Erkens, G. (2013). Toward a framework for CSCL research. Educational Psychologist, 48(1), 1-8.

 - Lowry, P. B., Curtis, A., & Lowry, M. R. (2004). Building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice. Journal of Business Communication, 41(1), 66-99.

 - Posner, I. R., & Baecker, R. M. (1992, January). How people write together [groupware]. In System Sciences, 1992. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on (Vol. 4, pp. 127-138). IEEE.

 - Prior, P. (2006). A sociocultural theory of writing. Handbook of writing research, 54-66.

(Picture source)

Collective development of wiki textbooks in teacher education

The last two years, I have been leading a project where we have tried to develop new textbooks in Norwegian Teacher Education through the use of wikis.

We developed two different wiki textbooks (“The Mentor Teacher” and “A guide for music teachers”). Both of these books are of quite high quality and people are currently working on improved versions of the books. We are also translating the book about mentoring into an English version which will hopefully be ready in June 2013. The wiki text permits flexible reuse because of special text license. 

This developmental work is intended to stimulate the development of a more transparent knowledge sharing environment at Østfold University College, but also far beyond this specific institution. This is the reason why it has been important to stimulate the development of sustainable communities that can continue to develop these textbooks. We have encouraged contributions from several different stakeholders such as experienced teacher educators, student teachers and teachers. In this way we try to challenging traditional production of textbooks and the notion of teachers and student teachers as only being “textbook consumers”.

The project is funded by Norway Opening Universities and started in 2011 and continue until spring 2014.

Picture source

Wiki page about Knowledge Building

I have made a wiki page with some examples of Knowledge Building. I did this because I wanted to find out more about how teachers work with Knowledge Building in school. So I checked the site Knowledge Building Resources and found out that Chew Lee Teo had recently finished a PhD-thesis with a lot of qualitative data about Knowledge Building. It seemed interesting, so I downloaded the thesis and picked out some examples from the text. I then published the examples on this wikipage. In addition I have found pictures from Wikimedia Commons that illustrate different pedagogical activities. Be aware that the text is a draft version. The English language is far from perfect. There are spelling mistakes. Please feel free to do necessary changes.

So you may ask yourself why I am using Wikibooks. As with all applications there are advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages
Because it´s quite easy to write together in a wiki. Wikibooks is a website where anyone can produce open-content textbooks which others can download for free or continue to modify and develop. I think it would be interesting for the Knowledge Building community to use some more open production environments where people can work together. This may create both more Idea diversity and coherence in the field. The research discourse has its publishing environments, but maybe text production in wikis can strengthen the practical-pedagogical discourse about Knowledge Building. One goal should be to try and encourage teachers to write about what they are doing.

I am trying to work according to a similar strategy in Norway. This year I have published two textbooks this way, but they are in Norwegian. Hopefully, these books will be rewritten and reused in a variety of ways.The text is published under a free license which permits unconditional reuse and modification as long as the new text is published under the same license.

An interesting feature with Wikibooks is that you can easily convert several wiki pages into a PDF-file or an ebook. You can even buy your own book in a paper version through a print-on-demand service which is called Pedia Press.

When publishing text at this website you also get free access to 14 million media files through the Wikimedia Commons database.

Disadvantages
A disadvantage with the design of the wiki page about Knowledge Building is that you have to do a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom to the page. A better solution might be to make a front page that gives you an overview and then you can choose which topics you want to read about in more detail by following different links. Here is an example of a wiki front page related to the science curriculum in Norway.

Wikis are not difficult to use, but not all the coding is that easy if you want to make tables etc.