Appendix E: Interview

From WolfWikis

Interview with Dr. Joseph Moore (pseudonym) conducted by Toby Coley for his master’s thesis research project.

Purpose of Course

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

The name of the course was Methods and Materials for Teaching Social Studies in the Middle Grades, ECI435. This is a senior-level course that is taken by students majoring in middle grades education. Their emphasis is social studies and language arts. They take this course fall of their senior year and follow it up with teaching experience in the spring. I co-taught the experience with Carl Young, who taught the language arts portions of the course. We had the same students. We met on separate days but we had some occasions where we met in each other’s classroom. We had two major assignments that overlapped both courses and the assignments were completed for credit in both classes. One assignment was a project on conducting an inquiry into a self-selected topic; we called it the inquiry project. The second major assignment was a curriculum project developed around a self-selected subject area.

How did you get started?

2. “Remind me of how you got started in wikis and what made you decide to use wikis in education?”

I’m going to say I have actively known about it for maybe two or three years, following the development of the Wikipedia project. I started using wikis in my teaching, I believe, in the fall semester of 2005 at Georgia State University. It was a graduate-level course in social studies education and I had the students create a story and use a wiki to compile the story. I played around with Wikipedia before that, but I would not say I am an active contributor.

Changed View of Wikis

3. “How has your view of wikis changed since your initial encounter?”

My initial view was that the tool was really interesting and that there were a lot of applications for the construction of temporary knowledge in a way that was more permanent or more lasting, and certainly more public than what would be done on paper. I like the dynamic nature of the text in which users can contribute from anywhere, but I think, like a lot of people who come to it, I had questions about the veracity of the truth-ness of it. I felt comfortable that I could make my own critical decisions about what to believe and what not to believe. But when dealing with a middle-school or high-school environment, I certainly had some concerns about that. But I have to say, that over the last few years, I feel a lot more comfortable about it as an authoritative resource, particularly Wikipedia and all the projects surrounding it, due to what seems to be the energy generated from mass users, kind of an emerging culture of “getting it right” surrounding the articles. You do have to remain critical about what resources you use, but I feel a lot more comfortable with the end product.

Did wiki achieve goals

4. “How did the wiki help you achieve some of the previous goals you mentioned for your course? “

When I started the discussion about using the wiki before the semester, the way I envisioned it was as a tool that would facilitate students in a process of completing one or more of their assignments. I wasn’t sure which assignments we were going to use, but I felt like the inquiry project was a good candidate for the wiki. We wanted students to work on the inquiry over a long period of time. We had a process laid out to identify a topic, and then they were to narrow the topic and get secondary sources and hopefully with primary resources write a report on the topic. What I envisioned on that project with the wiki was that they start with, literally, a sentence and they would add to that and go in at any time they want and make not only those big period revisions but also to go back and edit their work at any time, and their peers would be able to take a look at it and offer suggestions. For the most part that is how we ended up using it but it wasn’t all that we had planned. “Good. We will get to that question later. This is a great start.”

And we used it for a few other things that were unforeseen at the beginning of the semester.

Which is better: Wiki or CMS?

5. “I am sure you are familiar with various course management software programs from your experience with them in the past, do you think wikis do a better job at some particular uses than those programs or visa versa?”

Yes, I think there are some differences. The tool that I have used is WebCT. I didn’t like WebCT. I felt like I was in a box and with my students and I could not really create much of anything. There are a couple of tools in WebCT that were really nice, the ability to automatically generate an email list to communicate to students and a synchronous chat feature I have used, not here, but at Georgia State. The rest of it I thought was very clumsy and not very useful. The course I talked about that I did a couple of years ago, I used a content management system that I managed to stumble my way through, called Droople, that you might be familiar with. You can just download it as a package, unpack it all, and install it on a server and have access to the server. I really bumbled my way through it but managed to get the site up and going and it did include some wiki-like functions, blogs, etc. I went out and downloaded a wiki tool and put it on a server and I created one. I really haven’t used it too much, but I have it out there. So I have my own wiki, it is sort-of devoted to social studies, but I have not got around to getting users, that is the key to this kind of technology. It is not an individual project; it needs to be a large community.

Better Wiki goals

6. “In retrospect, now that you have completed the course and know what you had planned for the wiki and what it turned out being used for, were there any particular goals that you can say were not appropriate for the wiki, but these other goals were appropriate?”

That’s good. I’m looking right now on the wiki to see remind myself what we did. We had nine specific things that we constructed on the wiki and of those nine things the one that ended up being the most unexpectedly useful was a list of lesson ideas. The students were constructing lessons for their unit. We took them, almost spur of the moment, into the lab (we had a lab right next to our classroom here in this building) and told them that “today we are going to talk about your lesson topics. You already have them written out, but instead of turning them in to me on paper, I want you to go on the wiki and put it on there. And they put it on there and what we were able to do was go back to that site and have them add material to it and that seemed to be very effective. Now, these were individual students working on their own page, and there wasn’t a lot of collaborative work on that, they were just adding to it. But the tool enabled them to go in and edit and existing document in a really meaningful way. . . I’m clicking on a couple of things here . . . and one that we didn’t get to dealt with North Carolina Native Americans. The group brainstormed some things they wanted to know. Well, what they did is they brainstormed what they already knew, and then we talked about what they wanted to know, and then we set about the process of learning new information. This is a pedagogical strategy called KWL. What you Know, what you Want to know, and what you want to Learn. And so we wrote stuff on the chalk board and took notes on it and I took it and put it on the wiki and created a portion of our front wiki page that contained this information. I had intended us to go back and edit this, and we never did. Now, I don’t know if it was because I put it on there and I never went back and edited it or exactly what happened on that one.

Student Willingness to Contribute

8. “Do you find that students seem to be more willing to contribute on the wiki when they have created the information versus when you (as teacher) create a document, an ownership issue?”

I think that’s true. If the student sees some purpose for it, then the wiki will be much more useful. And the reality is that some students used it a lot more comfortably than others. You may have found this out in your survey, but our reflection is that it is was a positive experience as a whole to our students.

Why some students reacted poorly

9. “Do you have an overall feeling of why some students did not react as well to wikis as others?”

It is at least two things. One is the general tendency for the student to be better, to commit to a higher level of work. We tend to emphasize this process in wanting to perform to our expectations. Students tend to be different in that regard. If everybody has the same abilities but some are intrinsically motivated more to do something different then this will make a difference. There was another element that related to the use of the technology and going on the computer. At some level there were some differences there. Not everybody had the same access, though I am not going to say that access was an issue, because I don’t know that for sure. You know, no one said to us, “I don’t have an internet connection, I can’t use the computer,” but that could have been something. I did have to help some more than others. There was a pattern that whenever we made a wiki assignment, or technology assignment (we also had a blog), there were a couple of students that went out and did it immediately and they were just much more comfortable with it. There were other students that didn’t, in fact we had a couple who didn’t do the work at all until the end. Those people said they had some difficulties with it. You might have some questions about this later, but there were some complications with multiple users on the wiki page at the same time, what happens when more than one person is trying to edit the same page.

How is writing used in your course?

10. “We’ll talk a little more about problems you found later, so let’s hold that thought. In terms of writing, how do you use writing in your course work and what is your pedagogy behind writing?”

I tend toward more analytical writing in my classes. Though I see the value in a more creative style, the writing in my classes tends to express knowledge more directly, almost technical writing, if you will. I have my students create lesson plans and things like that. I have used a narrative style of writing before where students research something historical and write a narrative report but not in the particular course we have been talking about. You could call it a narrative pedagogy where the student tells their story or research, including how and what they found, and how that relates to pedagogy. The wiki enables personal writing and make the process of writing mobile, it can be done anywhere at anytime. It makes editing very simple and essentially de-centers the typical linear structure of writing for things like journal entries.

Problems with wiki?

11. “Any problems you have seen with wikis?”

Yes, I wanted to provide feedback for my students through commenting functions that the wiki does not currently have. I found that trying to look at the tracked changes of the various iterations was too complicated for the student (and teacher) to find intuitive. Second, when multiple users try to edit a page simultaneously, the first user to submit information wins and the second loses the edit they were working on when they attempt to submit. I had to get students, when working in the lab, to wait for their turn in order to make a change to a particular page. Thirdly, the formatting is hard for students who do not have experience with HTML code. If students created in Microsoft Word and copy and pasted information, the formatting would be lost. Formatting in writing is part of expression and I would put that in this category of problems. When I had to become the formatter, it was like I was taking over that part of the writing for students.

How can wiki grow

12. “In what ways do you want to see the software grow?”

I’d like to see the ability to track the posts, attributed. I want to see the differences or changes in the article in the context of the article instead of separated out as they are now. For looking at the process, I would like to be able to see this in context. This is a minor issue, but on the toolbar, when you click on main menu you are taken back to the wikis first page, not necessarily the page you are looking for as your home page. There is a little bit of the old “lost in hyperspace” for students because of this. If you didn’t know what you were doing this would have been hard.

Future Research Questions

13. “What are some of the questions you would be interested in seeing explored in the future of wiki research?”

There are kind of big questions and small questions. Small questions would be those that are particular to Carl and me for our course. Those might relate to the manner in which the writing process can aid in the development of pedagogical knowledge. I see pedagogy as a process and the wiki can help us in that process and help students see their own process. The big question I have is the way in which the construction of knowledge can be democratized in a wiki, particularly in something like Wikipedia. It has become a real resource all across the world. You have a lot of people who doubt the usefulness of Wikipedia, but I think you are seeing an emergence, and I am going to put myself in this category, that see it as a very useful tool and last year’s publication in Nature about the Wikipedia and Britannica has helped a lot of academics re-evaluate the usefulness of Wikipedia. Another thing, and this is kind of juvenile but I am going to mentioned it because I love it. Another colleague and I want to test the ability of Wikipedia to police itself. We want to see, again it is very juvenile, but we want to go in and add something very small to a big collection (and we would have to get some manpower to do this), like a thousand biographical entries and insert somewhere in there that that person likes pie . . . and see how many of them are taken out, so the “I like pie project.” I did one to Hugo Shavez and it took seven seconds to be corrected and it wasn’t caught by the bot, but by a person. And I have found some that have stuck. So there are limits of veracity that can be tested.

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