Appendix D: Interview

From WolfWikis

Interview with Dr. Charles Jarod, director of a writing program at a large R1 university, conducted by Toby Coley for his master’s thesis research project.

Could you tell me the name and purpose of the course you used this last semester (fall 2006) in which you used the wiki?

This particular course is part of a core which all of the students are required to take and then they supplement those courses with elective courses. This course focuses on the relationship between pedagogy in the communication arts. That is, in mostly writing and speaking in higher education and the relationship between pedagogy in that area and new emerging technologies. So it is a course that focuses on theories, practices, and research in technology-enhanced writing or speaking.

Overview of how you became interested in wikis and what guided you to use wikis in education?

I am trying to think of the first time I used a wiki. It may have been in the context of something like Wikipedia. I think many people learned about wikis in the public realm, rather than the educational realm. That seems to be the case in higher education . . . that wikis began to get popular in other worlds and crept into, or were drawn into, educational circles. Then I started hearing the term a lot more. I had been to Hawaii a couple times and had gone from one part of the airport to another and had seen this term, so when the first time I heard it I thought, “Well, now isn’t that the same term the Hawaiians use for fast?” There were these little busses that shuttle you between the terminals and so I think I got drawn to wonder, “What are these about?” I think probably when I got really interested educationally, is when I began working on a book on digital technologies and teaching and it’s been focusing on teachers at the college and K-12 level. And I’ve been working on that with an ex-colleague of mine and he was the one who pushed me to start looking at wikis because he had done a lot of work with them. So I started poking around the internet and started looking at ways that they were being used in education, so I think that they kind of gradually emerged and in a similar way that I got interested in blogging a little earlier than wikis.

How has your view of wikis changed since your initial experience?

Well, I think it probably changed as I used it, because at first, and again with the advice of my colleague who had been using wikis, he said, “If you want to start a wiki go to PbWiki and you will be able to do that for free.” It is this simple public wiki platform that has different levels like silver and gold and you can pay money for more and more features. So I went to PbWiki as I was designing this course, because the course itself needed a lot of high tech stuff in it. One of the things that we did in the course was to both try out and use different technologies, so I made sure I had a wiki in the course. We tried wikis, blogging, and some other things so that the students could then research and reflect on their use of it. PbWiki’s system, I found, was really cumbersome and partly it is because what I wanted to do with the wiki was have a course tool (I was using WolfWare here for some specific purposes) but I wanted the wiki to be really interactive because one of my goals was to use a constructivist approach to learning where part of what we were doing (it was a very small class) was making decisions about what we were going to read. I chose a handful of readings each week, usually between four to seven readings, almost all professional journals, and I would place those at our class wiki and then I would load PDF versions to the local course management system here and students could then click on the links and with their password it would open up the article. One of the requirements of the course was that they be in charge of some of the readings that they chose and the only way I could see doing that, because the local CMS wouldn’t allow me to do that, was to have a wiki, because it is open and people can go and work on it themselves. So theoretically students could then choose an article, add it to the wiki, if necessary. If they didn’t already have a link to it where it was just in the public domain, they would send it to me and I would place it online. So that is one way we used the wiki, where students were actual contributors to the wiki. The other ways that we used it was that I had set up a personal wiki space where they would theoretically put a lot of information about their course projects and that would be the holding place, the brainstorming or archiving place, where they would keep anything and everything that they found. References, links, brainstorm notes, they would all go there. My idea there was that the students would be able to look at each other’s ongoing project, into the workshop of someone building their project. That was the second way I used it, for the students to have a space. Another way I wanted to use it was for it to be a repository of information for this course, which was taught for the first time, that would carry over from section to section in the future and other people are going to teach it and that part of the wiki would stay behind after the course was over and every student would contribute references, links, etc., to this growing archive of information that would keep building over time. It would be this really robust space where people could go for resources and materials. Now you asked me how my conception changed from when I first learned about wikis. More flexibility than I thought. I thought they were really the place for people to . . . I guess I knew they were a place for people to put information and that function did not change much, that you are essentially putting information into a space. I didn’t know how I might use that information and with my three different ways I learned about some flexibility there of wikis.

How did the wiki help you achieve course goals?

I mentioned that PbWiki was really cumbersome because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. My course schedule, I wanted in tables, and I couldn’t get it to stay where I wanted. I got really frustrated and right at the moment that I was reaching the point of frustration where I was going to abandon the wiki methodology and go back to web stuff, there was an announcement at the university here about having created a wiki system. So I went immediately there to see if it was better and I found that it was much better and easier to use and a slightly different set of code. I could set up tables and stuff was stable, it just worked a lot better. I ended up leaving the PbWiki and I think the wiki I created there is still up. I started building the system on the library’s wiki. That particular wiki I found more usable. The issue is how usable something is, if you have different platforms for wikis, there may be ones that better suit certain tasks. In terms of how it fulfilled my goals, there are two levels of goals, and this is a little difficult because the course is about using technology, so one level was the three mentioned above and secondly how students interact with the technology. Anytime you experiment with a technology, whether it fails or not, if that is your goal, to experiment with it, you succeed. And because we used the wiki, tried it out and talked about what worked and didn’t, that goal was met. It was one of many technologies we tried out. In terms of the other three functions, that’s varied b/c the schedule function worked very well. Students placed information in the schedule; there were a few small glitches in terms of adding to it. The one proviso I would add to that, and this is actually a global response to the whole wiki, is that they seemed reluctant to go in and change things. I think they were ok at the level of adding an article. They didn’t want to mess with the structure of the wiki. I told them to go in and play with the structure if it needs work, because I had it arranged bibliographically. Halfway through the course we realized that we shouldn’t have books and articles separated but they still didn’t mess with that system, even though they knew it needed work. So there is a very big issue here of the power dynamics of the teacher relative to the students and presumably the way a wiki works, which is to encourage anyone to go in and contribute to it. They feel it is like a course syllabus, you would never change a professor’s course syllabus. It would be like taking too much control and authority. I kept telling them repeatedly that the wiki is our wiki, here is the theory behind it, it is supposed to be a place where we add things and change things and then if we don’t like something we can change it back collectively. Even as graduate students they had a hard time there I think. When you think of the way it is when students set up personal blog spaces, because they have set it up and they feel like they own it, they are willing to do stuff to them. There is a weird sense of ownership, like “who’s wiki is this?” and can I mess with it. It was very hard to get across to the class that this is our wiki, it is not my wiki. I would like to do research on that, on how people construct spaces on the internet that are set up by a teacher. I don’t think they did nearly as much as I wanted with the archive. With the third function, their own space, they really started using it at the end of the course. I wanted them to use it throughout. Two of the students said that they had their own methods of archiving and keeping track of their projects on their computers and I was asking them to use a space that felt different than what they were used to and they were not willing to do that. They were comfortable with their system and they did not want to use the wiki. I don’t think they cared whether other people saw it in the class; actually it is a public wiki so anyone can read it. So I don’t think it was the publicness of the wiki, just this is not how I normally do things. So maybe it will be counter-productive to put stuff there.

“That brings up interesting concerns about how graduate students encounter wikis versus freshman composition students. Are the grad students going to have a harder time relinquishing those familiar structures versus the freshman?”

It could be that if I had said to a class of freshman, “this is our wiki, go for it,” that they would have all been in to it. This is a puzzle. These are people who I continually admonished to use the wiki. We had a blog and they used it much more often. They really felt the blog was a place they could interact. So it is something I think we need to find out more about. How do people feel about this as a space for storing, adding, and changing information?

What do you see as the benefits of wiki technology, in terms of CMS and the way wikis affect or enable pedagogy?

Well, I don’t think it is a good course-management system. I think it is an ancillary kind of system and I think the greatest advantage it has, if you think about what is already available for students, is the ability to interact and add information. A lot of times because of the way it is organized, content gets lost. There is an additive function to things like blogs, and other technology where students are placing information, it is not a replacement or revising system, it is an additive system which goes down linearally, sometimes it goes down hierarchically and it is hard for students to navigate through the kind where, for example in an message board or blog system where you are adding content to somebody else’s post versus starting a new post, that is very complicated. The add a comment to someone’s previous comments gets buried within that structure, so it’s cumbersome. And it is also additive, which means you have to keep on scrolling down to read another message. I think the advantage of the wiki is that students can go there and refine, revise, and add to the text world that the wiki is holding. They can add to it if they want, but they can also change things. And so if you think of a class project, or maybe several wikis where students are working in groups, it becomes entirely collaborative. If you imagine you have a class of twenty students and you have groups of four and you set up five different wikis and each group has a project they are working on together and the product will be at this wiki as an information thing with maybe links, it becomes completely seamless collaboration in terms of people actually going in and changing people’s work and adding content. But it is still a single text. It is not layers of text and it’s not one text added to another. That part of the technology really intrigues me. I love the notion of revision. A personal wiki where your just using it to store information in your field, its amazing because you can keep changing things. You can update things. You have categories, you have a special index you can create that helps you navigate. So it is a great way to keep a compendium of material as long as you’re good at code.

In retrospect, were there any particular goals you believe were, and were not, appropriate for the wiki?

I think the goal of having students use the wiki as a repository of knowledge for their ongoing research was misguided. Just because, and in another class I might not have found this to be the case, but these folks dealt a lot with technology and they have found ways, different types of storage systems of their own that they prefer. So my asking them, my setting up a space and expecting them to use it for that function was misguided. I would say that was, among the three main functions, the one that failed the most. I thought the schedule worked well so I would use that again in retrospect. It was easy to go in and edit it. I am teaching a course now, a sophomore through senior level course in which I am not using a wiki. And partly it is because there isn’t that function in it. I think that if I had set up a wiki, it would have been for students to place terms and concepts and I would have assigned those. My concern about the wiki with this group is that I didn’t think they would be able to figure it out fast enough. I thought there would be lots of misunderstandings and frustrations with people messing the wiki up and my having to go back and fix it. It is real easy to mess it all up if you put in the wrong code. Even though it has that view and save function, I worried. I have two students in my course right now, and I have a standard website that is no more complicated than any good website. These two students do not know how to navigate it and they are lost. It is clearly organized with links and headings, but they do not have enough experience with more than a web page to be able to do this. Based on that, I think my prediction was good. I would have had to do whole class sections on how to do the wiki without a great pay off. So now I am getting students to give me the terms and I am putting them on a website myself. I think the time it takes me to do that is less than dealing with the struggle of the wiki.

What kind of role does writing play in your course and how did you envision wikis supporting that writing role?

It’s not a writing course per say, but about writing with technology. The students had a big project where they wrote. They also did frequent informal writing, low-stakes writing. The way we did that actually took more than just the form of writing because we also did vid-casting and pod-casting. But we used a blog primarily with low stakes writing as a way of responding to readings. There was a lot of reading in the course and we only met once a week for three hours and I wanted people to be able to carry on conversations in between those class sessions. So we used a blog for that and a third of the way through the semester we switched to pod-casting. They had to write a longer reflection about each technology for low stakes writing. We went from written to oral, which was interesting. And another third of the way through we switched to vid-cast. Then we tried to reflect on the differences between a reflective written text that people would read, a reflective spoken text with no visuals that other people would hear and then the little video-cast of the person speaking. There were some interesting results and we felt differently about each method, though the pod-cast and vid-cast are similar, the presence of the camera made a huge difference. So that was the role of writing. The students had to lead us also, in a presentation several times and that was primarily oral communication.

Do you think that wikis have the ability or the potential to change student’s understanding of the nature of writing?

That’s a good question. Possibly. I think what wikis do is add a potentially collaborative, revision-based dimension to what is often a solitary activity. In typical courses in higher education, students write papers outside of class, they do them alone, they turn them in and get graded. The wiki compels people to be able to add information to an existing growing context or change the information already there. So if you have someone working on a project on gun control, people can go in and edit, add, or change information. The nice thing about wikis, especially when you look at Wikipedia, is that you have information with terms that link to other information and you can see what terms are not yet defined, they are usually in red. So you, as a contributor can say, “I know something about that,” and you can add to it. It is an exponentially growing base of information that if it changes people’s conceptions of writing at all, it makes them understand that knowledge is communally created and shaped. It might push them a little in that direction. It might also help them to learn about revision but I think you have to use it in specific ways to do that.

Do you see any major limitations of wikis and how would you like to see wikis grow?

Probably the closer it gets to word processing, and this is true for any technology, the easier it is going to be for people to use because that is what they are used to and have learned from. They learn how to produce texts and now learn how to navigate the web. If you are going to learn how to create something, a simple text editor knowledge is something students seem to bring in to college. What you are being asked to do with a wiki is to learn a new, fairly simple (nothing like HTML), method. There is a percentage of stuff you can do with just knowing something like five different codes, like adding texts and bold face. You can learn a handful of those codes to do a majority of the things you want to do, but there is still a system behind it you need to learn. There will be a learning curve for people and there will be mistakes. I think that in the future as it gets easier to use, it will be used more.

What do you see as some of the rhetorical concerns surrounding use of wikis in the classroom?

That’s a great question. Students are used to things like blogging where you have a real relationship to the voice and persona in the stuff they are writing. A lot of the blogging people have grown up with is personal opinion and a lot of political discussion and opinion. I think the wiki got established more as an information portal where people could go and get stuff. We hope the accuracy is there. One of the rhetorical issues is that the wiki is simply a system and it could admit to personal things, but I think it has found a niche in the options for technology for an information base. It is identified with that maybe because of Wikipedia. So I think students can have a hard time negotiating rhetorically, that distance you have when writing. You don’t see a lot of “I” in wikis. You don’t have any idea who is behind the stuff. It has been collectively created. The personal voice is not typical. It is flexible enough to use it for that but why not use something else for that like a blog. It is partly the way we socially construct the systems and how that becomes entrenched. We say, “well we know what a wiki is, what a blog is,” but they can be anything. We construct the functions in a way that they are opposed to one another. Rhetorically, in terms of process, there are things that can go wrong. Like people adding things to a wiki wrong. Information people feel is good gets changed and they are upset. Information is always slanted and biased, so someone might put information that in its very selection seems to lean toward one perspective or ideology. Then someone else comes along and says, “wait a minute, this is too conservative a view,” or something. I think that complexity could be interesting to talk about with students.

Do you have a theory of multimodality and how do wikis play into that?

It seems we are moving in that direction. Some of the neatest research subjects I’ve seen, even in the public schools have been multimedia projects where students have still photos, video clips, different kinds of images in an artful web design. I think we are going quickly in that direction and writing courses need to get out of the middle ages and start teaching students what it means to produce things in more than one mode. So my theory is yes, we are going there and we need to be attentive to it. I am still very much interested in text, I think text is still a primary means of communication that is being combined with other types of media. From what I have seen with wiki, the main wiki tends to be pretty textual. Because there are links, you can link to other web pages that might not be. I just have not seen any wikis that are . . . the difference to me between the encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, which is replacing it, is that I have not seen the level of visual imagery in wikis. They just don’t allow more than primarily text links. It supports multimedia in a good way in that you start with a primarily textual representation that allows you to secondarily find other media.

How critical do you think it is for a teacher to have an understanding of multimodality in their teaching of writing and can wikis contribute to a student’s multimodal literacy?

I think it is crucial. They are not keeping up if they are not reading the literature on multimodal communication and not thinking about how it fits into their own lives. If we are preparing students in higher education to go across to courses in other curriculums, they are going to rapidly come into areas were they contact other modalities, in presentation. Now in the sciences we see sessions where there are two computers and people have to know how to navigate this stuff as they are moving past the posters. Oral presentations that are increasingly supplemented by visuals that are no longer just power-points are also growing. There are little clips or pictures. If we are preparing students for those settings, then we have a lot more to do than having them right essays. The question is how much and what does it look like. So that’s one. Do teachers have an obligation? Yes, that is how writing is working now. If students do not know how to create a website, then wikis are easier. It is easy to create links; the question is whether they know how to create links. It is a different kind of multimodality than a webpage that would have both images and text. I have seen it primarily as a textual medium with a secondary set of links to other things that open up. Maybe that will change and wikis will become more multimodal. That is an easy way for students to begin experimenting with multimedia.

What kind of research would you like to see on wikis?

It would be interesting to see how developing writers would interact with each other work on a wiki, studies of collaborative revision. What do they do and why when they’re changing it. In terms of pedagogy, it would be interesting to study, when people consult a wiki, what are they consulting it for, where do they go, how long do they spend exploring the article and links.

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