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The technology affordances of personal wikis in higher education
Peter McDowellSchool of Education
Charles Darwin University
peter.mcdowell@cdu.edu.au
Learning Management Systems
• Self-contained, virtual learning environments (VLEs)
• Branded, customised, and quality-controlled
• Centralised administration (enrolment, assessment, and certification)
• Heightened security and academic integrity
• Facilities to help diagnose the ‘student experience’
• Commercial consultancy and support
A case for LMS alternatives
• Higher education students often require more exposure to more technology than is offered through their institution’s LMS
• Students’ informal experiences with relevant technologies (e.g. Web 2.0) are often superior to those accessed through their institution’s LMS
• Common examples: social networking tools, community forums, weblogs, wikis
Educational use of wikis
• Collaborative emphasis
• Accrual of socially acceptable content
• Linking of coherent, internally consistent material
• Tendency to anonymise contributions
• Versioning downplays learners’ approximations
Repurposing wikis
• Structuring diverse sources of information
• Making connections with prior learning
• Considering alternative interpretations
• Modelling complex situations
• Managing knowledge acquisition
Personal wikis
• Emphasise the information handling potential of wikis (the repurposing)
• Harness (where appropriate) the collaborative benefits of wikis
Research questions
• How suitable are personal wikis as an LMS alternative?
• What are the technology affordances of personal wikis in higher education?
Gaver’s theory of affordances
• Developing the idea of an affordance as the potential for an artefact to become involved in human activity
• Stresses the importance of analysing the interdependence of artefacts, humans, and the information available to systems of perception (especially at the human-machine interface)
Gaver’s theory of affordances
False Affordance
Perceptible Affordance
Correct Rejection
Hidden Affordance
Perceptible?
Aff
ord
an
ce?
No Yes
No
Yes
Educational context
•Students’ self-rated reaction when needing to use some new technology (at entry)
Revised research question
• Do personal wikis have any specific technology affordances:
• that might promote positive student interest in technological exploration?
• that might enhance pre-service teachers’ awareness of the advantages of technology-enhanced learning?
Specific requirements
• Large cohort (370+)
• Large proportion of external students (83%+)
• Online and offline access (remote students)
• Able to integrate easily with existing LMS (Blackboard Learn)
• Develop students’ digital literacies
Perceptible affordances
• Course package
• Micro-content (‘tiddlers’)
• Hyperlinking (deliberate and automatic)
• Extensible (programming of additional features)
• Embedded assessment
Hidden affordances
• Able to trace students’ work practices, learning, and contributions through the timeline
• Support for reflective journalling
False affordances
• Downloading the file required before opening
• File versioning (timestamped backup files are made prior to update)
Novel affordances
• Support for transclusion
• Transclusion is a crucial aspect of Theodor Nelson’s notion of hypertext
• Linking sends the reader elsewhere
• Hyperlinks should also be two-way
• Transclusion brings content from elsewhere to the reader (blended into the present context)
Xanalogical Structure
Source: http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm
Concluding the unit
•Students’ self rating on the proposition “I am a literate producer of hypertext” (at exit)
Complex objects
• Place considerable demands on human agency
• Encourage active exploration
• Students’ exploration of the affordances leads to discovery of the system (a hidden affordance)
• The reverse does not hold: awareness of the system does not mean that the affordances are perceptible
Implications
• Potential for formal and informal learning (ubiquitous learning)
• Supporting a richer notion of hypertext promotes conceptual modelling and general systems thinking
• Hypertext pedagogy is still emerging
• Further research is needed on the interplay between learning through complex objects (in this case, personal wikis) and student assessment
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