Core Activity 10.1 Wikis in Our Practice

Learning and Teaching Committee Report

By Madeleine McGrath, 15th January 2010 

Background
The Future Shape of the Winner™ is a new organisation model, designed by Tom Peters Company for use with our own clients. The model, and its accompanying audit instrument, the Excellence Audit, began in 2009 to attract the attention of independent consultants from all over the world, who requested the chance to be trained and accredited as users of the audit and the model. Having identified a group of 8 consultants who were willing to sign up for the pilot programme, we ran our first programme in October 2009. Since the participants came from five different countries, and had many differences in background, education, language etc, a distance learning format was not only the only affordable option, it was also the most effective learning approach.

Whilst there has been much enthusiasm from the students of the first programme, we find ourselves, some two months after the training has finished, with only one student having been able to convince a customer to commission an Excellence Audit. Whilst others may yet have success in this endeavour, the absence of any structured evidence of their learning has emerged as a weakness in the design of this course. As we look ahead to the next course, this paper proposes the incorporation of technologies that will encourage the more public articulation of learning, and will generate deeper learning amongst all participants. 

Current practice

The FSW Distance Learning Programme has been designed and facilitated by a team of tutors whose grounding in teaching took place before the digital era. As a result, the bias of the delivery has tended towards what Ferris & Wilder (2006) would describe as the Print Model of education, with the teacher as expert from whom the students learn. They observed, "instructors continue to equate the authority and ownership of knowledge with the teacher, who controls the text, whether print or electronic, rather than with the learners" Unfortunately in this case, once the classroom training is completed, the success of the programme is dependent on the learners taking ownership of the knowledge and applying it in their own context. So far the evidence is that this transfer has not yet taken place in all but one of the students. 

The existing programme has a substantial written Practitioners Guide, a blog-site on which students are encouraged to contribute to blog threads on the various subjects covered during the programme, four two hour synchronous web tutorials, and pre and post tutorial activities. The final step in the training process is for trainees to participate actively in their first Excellence Audit having sold it to a client of their own. During the course of the audit they will be mentored by one of the course tutors. 

On the first programme, the eight students all attended and participated fully in all four web tutorials, and completed their assignments as requested. All professed themselves very pleased with the training, and had few suggestions for improvement of any substance. However, we are not aware of how well students are able to articulate their learning at this critical half way point in the training. Articulation of their learning is critical for two reasons; firstly, of course, because this is an essential step in making the progression through to deep learning, but secondly, and more importantly, because unless they can convincingly articulate their learning, they will be unable to sell this approach to their own clients.

As we consider ways to make the training more effective in future iterations of the programme, my recommendation is to experiment with a number of design and technology modifications that encourage students to articulate their learning on a more frequent basis, and to document their discoveries throughout the entire course of the training programme. This will enrich their learning, but equally importantly will provide tutors with much greater visibility of how learners are progressing. Shifting more strongly into the digital domain also provides us with the opportunity to encourage greater learner ownership of the material, and to encourage learners to shape the learning activities to suit their own situations.

Greater use of blogging as a domain for individual reflective commentary is one obvious way to shift the focus of the training. Requiring all students to create and keep a reflective commentary on their learning throughout the programme would be a straightforward modification to make, and one which immediately makes more visible the learning that is taking place. This is likely to be uncontroversial for both learners and tutors.

The use of a Wiki or some kind of shared workspace is a second, maybe less obvious option to consider. In the next section I will describe the potential benefits of this technology, and how its use can be piloted in the next programme. The potential issues that are may arise will also be considered.

Recommendation

Ferris & Wilder (2006) describe the wiki as "collaborative Web-based sites with "open editing"." The collaborative activity that is enabled in the wiki-type environment generates interaction and can lead to the creation of strong communities that share a common interest. 

The structure of the wiki is relatively simple, and it can be used in many different ways. Lamb (2004) suggests using them for creating agendas, note taking in group sessions, informal bulletin boards. Ferris & Wilder (2006) see enormous potential for collaborative learning, and suggest joint problem solving, brainstorming and group tasks. Duffy et al (2006) recommend their use for collaborative authorship and writing and point out that the feature of being able to trace the contributions of all participants encourages participation.

Lamb (2004) observes that whilst the lack of structure in a wiki can make it feel disorganised, it also leaves space for learners to make their own links and to organise it for themselves. As well as learning about the subject matter, this also requires groups to work out processes that will enable them to work together. In the longer term, this experience can build a community of users who continue to network as they become experienced users of this approach.

In this programme, we have found significant variability in the technology skills of students. I am therefore recommending that we introduce the use of the wiki progressively, beginning with some simpler tasks, such as generating questions or agenda items for the next meeting, or perhaps by inviting students to add comments to an existing wiki page. We should then re-locate one or two of the existing private study activities to the wiki area, providing us with the chance to discover who is engaging actively in their study. One such activity would be the analysis of the audit results. Rather than just being given a real set of results to study, those results could be posted on some wiki pages, and the group challenged to discuss and agree the main issues uncovered by the audit results. Ideally, as their competence and confidence improves, it would be good to be able to set a final collaborative task for the whole group to pull together their individual and collective learning. The creation of their own slide presentation to explain the approach in their words and terms is one such possibility.

In the true spirit of the wiki, however, learners should be encouraged to create learning projects and activities of their own as they grow in confidence with the subject, with each other, and with the wiki environment.

Issues

Several issues with the use of wikis have been referred to already; the reluctance of Print Paradigm professionals to engage with technology and the lack of structure being the most notable.

Duffy et al (2006) warn that those grounded in the print paradigm have an instinctive distrust of the wiki concept. They also advise that the maximum benefit is gained from wikis when students are allowed complete control of the environment. Both of these issues point to the need for a shift in the approach that tutors have been taking and for the careful application of appropriate pedagogy to exploit the benefits of the wiki environment.

The fact that the wiki is in a constant state of flux may frustrate both learners and tutors, and some may be offended by the interference from others in their text, or may run into disputes about the ownership of written material. However, the reality of the subject matter about which they are learning is that it is not a prescribed and defined model, but one that requires judgement, adaptation and flexibility. All of these features are modeled in the wiki environment.

Another frequent criticism of the wiki environment is the questionable acccuracy or truthfulness of the information presented. Ferris & Wilder (2006) point out that skills to judge the accuracy and reliability of sources of information are becoming critical for any users of the world wide web for data. Learning to operate successfully in a wiki environment could be seen as the chance to develop such skills. 

ConclusionThe ability to convert trainees from all parts of the globe into successful users of our Company’s Excellence Audit has massive potential as a completely new stream of business for our company. This makes the creation of a successful training programme an important priority. In the next iteration of this programme, one of the most important priorities has to be the surfacing of the learning of individual consultants. Increased use of blogs is one way to record and publish this individual learning.

Whilst the gradual introduction of the use of wikis is also a way of showcasing each students’ ability to articulate their learning, it is also a place in which we can introduce more complex group discussions and tasks, and through that, not only enhance individual learning, but also begin to create the extended learning community that we envisage as important for the future.

We need to be conscious of the potential reluctance of colleagues to embrace the new technology, but must remind them of the enormous payoff for us all if we are able to make a radical improvement in the learning performance of students.

References:
Duffy, Peter D. and Bruns, Axel (2006) The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities. In: Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, 26 Sep. 2006, Brisbane.
Ferris, S. and Wilder, H. (2006) ‘Uses and potentials of wikis in the classroom’, Innovate, vol. 2, no. 5. Available from: http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol2_issue5/ (accessed 12th January 2010)
Lamb, B. (2004) ‘Wide open space: wikis, ready or not’, Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October), pp. 36–48. Available from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp (accessed 11th January 2010)