Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

25 – Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
strict definitions of collaboration (see Chapter 28, Online
Collaboration: An Overview).
A technologically unsophisticated user D, encountering
a page authored by a user C, may in many cases
feel too intimidated to alter the text in any way and may
instead create a totally new page. If this is titled User D
Perspective, for example, this may be an entirely appropriate
strategy. If the pages largely overlap in content,
though, and if the relationship between them is not indicated,
it creates a redundancy which may never lead to
real engagement between the two users, since the wiki
does not have the structures in place to push users towards
discussion; or rather, although wikis can easily
support discussion, this functionality is not foregrounded
by default. The emphasis is very much on
creating pages, which are works in their own right, ready
to be read profitably by others.
Thus, it may be better to avoid wiki exercises with
non-advanced users or to make the exercises very limited
in scope and pre-structure the wiki to some degree.
Product over process
While co-authoring a wiki page can be a highly collaborative
and ongoing process, each time a page is saved it
becomes a product. Although this product has the potential
for future development, it is nevertheless very
much a product in the eye of the casual visitor, and there
is an unseen pressure on the authors to make it a “real”
product on each page. Although much depends on the
purpose of the wiki and the context surrounding its
creation, in general the product aspect can be considered
as being foregrounded, and this has a subtle effect
on the dynamics of the process and the interaction between
users. It is up to teachers to decide whether or not
this is a positive thing. In general, we consider it overwhelmingly
positive, as it focuses attention on incompletions
and imperfections.
Note that this does not mean that all problems have
to be solved definitively. However, they do have to be
acknowledged and defined as far as is practical, and this
opens the way for future attempts at completion.
From thread to document mode
It is with relatively sophisticated users that wikis may
come into their own, when teachers encourage the use of
thread mode initially, but also encourage a process
leading to a product in document mode (Bruns & Humphries,
2005; Morgan, 2004). In other words, at first
learners respond to each other’s ideas on the page as if
the page were a thread in a discussion forum, but gradually
begin to take ideas from other contributors, from
various parts of the page, and merge them into a partial
summary or reconciliation of different viewpoints.
These summaries serve in turn as raw material for others
to summarize or exploit in other ways to achieve a
higher synthesis.
“Wiki goes meta—almost naturally.” (Morgan, 2004)
In this process, even signed comments lose any clear
authorship and become material for the co-authored
text that emerges. Though this process can be difficult to
achieve, it is arguably the highest form of collaboration,
and serves to demonstrate advantages of wikis over
more fully featured threaded discussion forums.
EXTENDED WIKIS
As mentioned above, wikis are not easy to use to their
full potential in many educational settings. A large part
of the difficulty is a conceptual and attitudinal one. If
students do not wish to work together, it will be difficult
to use a wiki effectively (Rick & Guzdial, 2006). There
may be resistance to the idea of editing another’s text.
The number of cases where a satisfying transformation
from thread to document mode takes place may be quite
limited, except where students are mature and there is a
pre-existing culture of collaboration (Chapter 28, Online
Collaboration: An Overview).
In addition, there a number of difficulties associated
with classic wiki engines that may be overcome by enhancements
to the software, and we deal with some of
these here. We use the term extended wiki to refer to
software that is in general functionality and look-andfeel
a wiki engine, yet sports enhancements that take it
clearly beyond most wiki engines in certain areas. We do
not offer a hard-and-fast definition because, as wikis in
general evolve, the functionality that qualifies an engine
to be classified as an extended wiki is something of a
moving target.
Simultaneous edits
Wikis are asynchronous tools in the sense that there is
no requirement to be logged in at the same time as other
users. This is on the whole a strength, but classic wiki
engines can be inconvenient for in-class use because two
users may edit the same page at the same time, potentially
causing one user’s changes to be lost, depending
on the relative timing of the respective users’ saves. Most
wiki engines these days implement some measures to
alleviate this problem. PhpWiki, for example, uses special
markup to indicate areas where two people have
made simultaneous edits between saves, giving the user
the chance to reconcile the two versions, usually by
396 Education for a Digital World