Learning Outcomes

# in negotiation with your learning facilitator have identified an issue to investigate through action enquiry
# have planned and undertaken an action enquiry
# have investigated and selected an appropriate model in support of your enquiry
# have evaluated your work using self and peer assessment
# have communicated your finding using appropriate technology

Assessment Criteria

# Select and negotiate appropriate tasks to meet learning outcome
# Ability to take responsibility for own learning
# Ability to relate theory to practice
# Evidence of developing analytical skills
# Reflect upon individual strengths and weaknesses

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to: Frankie Roberto, Evan Roberts, Eve Thirkle, Linda Hartley, Bob Dick, Gina Revill plus ultrastudents members who responded to the prototype questionnaire and all ukcider list members.

Contents.

I suggest the broad term "research" means methodical enquiry.

A definition: Research is a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. - various sources including Clemson University office of Research Compliance

Appropriate research methods can be quantitative, qualitative or a combination of both depending on the subject under scrutiny and the opportunities available to the researcher. Social attitudes surveys for HM Government for example, are conducted by amassing quantitative interview data from scientifically representative population samples, using professional interviewers questioning people at pre-selected addresses and inputting data directly through pre-programmed laptops. The generalised conclusions are apparently valued by the funders and sometimes sold on. http://www.natcen.ac.uk/

Qualitative research concerns itself with revealing the nature or truth about a subject through a journey of discovery, systematically following leads and searching for relevance. It's what journalists and anthropologists do, whereas quantitative research is what Highway planners and epidemiologists do - counting journeys or identifying clusters through statistical analysis.

Action Research began in the USA during the 1940s through the work of Kurt Lewin, and emerged in the 1970s in Britain through the work of Lawrence Stenhouse who directed the Humanities Curriculum Project. It was developed mainly by academics in higher education, who saw it as a way of working with teacher education. So it has its origins, and remains today firmly in the humanities faculties rather than the natural sciences. Controversially, Social Science has continued to be regarded as a Humanities subject.

Kurt Lewin described action research as "proceeding in a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of planning, action and the evaluation of the result of action" (Kemmis and McTaggert 1990:8). This is the methodical approach which allows Action Enquirers to claim what they do to be research.

The crucial quality of Action Enquiry for me, is the word "Action". Much conventional science adopts a Descartian reductionist quasi-objective stance, pretending that the observer is unobtrusive upon what is being observed, even decades after demonstrable quantum physics theory has shown the limitations of such a model. Action Enquiry on the other hand, cheerfully emphasizes the role of the researcher and therefore is a powerful instrument for researching one of the most important subjects of all - the nature of change.

I noticed that some academic practitioners who advocate Action Research do so from a position of total opposition to Logical Positivism, often in a crude reductionist way which comes over as "anti science".

Logical Positivism is based on a number of principles, including: a belief in an objective reality, knowledge of which is gained from sense data that can be directly experienced and verified between independent observers. Phenomena are subject to natural laws that humans discover in a logical manner through empirical testing, using inductive and deductive hypotheses derived from a body of scientific theory.

Positivism, used in scientific and applied research, has been considered by many to be the antithesis of the principles of action research (Susman and Evered 1978, Winter 1989).

I tried to make explicit my own philosophical stance and how it differs from anti-positivism through a dialogue in the Ultraversity community (see appendix1). I felt sure I had made one or two mistakes but nobody was interested in exploring the ideas any further at the time so I shall have to return to it later.

references:

unknown. (2002). Research Compliance. Clemson University. Available: URL http://www.clemson.edu/research/orcSite/orcIRB_DefsR.htm. Last accessed 20 March 2005.

National Centre for Social Research. (2005). . NatCen. Available: URL http://www.natcen.ac.uk/. Last accessed 20 March 2005.

Emergent Research

This type of Action research begins without a clear hypothesis to test, instead collecting ideas and data first, allowing questions or suggestions for change to emerge from the process of the action research itself. The research design can be improved gradually as understanding of the situation grows through observation and practice. .

Technical Action Research

This is a kind of third party action research undertaken by intervening in somebody else's practice at their suggestion.

Emancipatory Action Research

In North America the strand of Action Research to reach prominence is politically motivated in that it seeks to bring about a change in the world view of participants. The aim of this Emancipatory AE is not merely to learn something but to change society.

1st Person Action Research

This is where the researcher is inquiring into their own reactions, feelings and ideas as a result of action, collecting information through introspection. This could be combined with either an emergent research approach or hypothesis testing.

Distributed Action Research

Research into or using online communities and digital tools. Although many people have started to conduct research in this manner recently, it doesn't seem to be described as a separate discipline yet, but I feel it needs its own category because internet communities have their own unique customs and associated ethics due to the technology enabling new means and modes of communication so I invented the term Distributed Action Research to cover it. Examples of issues unique to DAR are

• a blurring of precise copyright conventions where people's writing is freely quoted in replies.
• the relationship between online identity and 'real' identity
• the weight of consideration given to those who express an opinion compared to those who 'lurk'.
• the need for the researcher to join or already be a part of the community and not just observe it from without.(differing from some ethnological approaches)

Postscript:

I have since found one existing reference to the term "Distributed Action Research" attributed to Dr. Diana Laurillard the Head of the eLearning strategy unit at the DfES, who asked

Can academic research and distributed action research inform practice and policy?

at a The Report of a Workshop held in London on the 9th of May 2003 entitled

"Realising the Potential of eLearning" ( googled HTML version viewable at http://tinyurl.com/66juu )

Postscript 2:

The term "Distributed Action Research" has since been developed by Andy Roberts and can be explored on the DARwiki at http://distributedresearch.net/wiki

references:

Fleming, J et al . (2003). Realising the potential of e-learning. EPSRC. Available: URL http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/CMSWeb/Downloads%5COther%5CeLearning
%20Workshop%20Full%20Report.pdf. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

Because I shall be working with existing communities I need to minimise any possible damage or disruption caused to those communities or individuals through the actions that I propose to take.

I need to inform all the members that a research project is being undertaken so that they participate with informed consent.

Copyright is also an issue. Because anybody can edit the Wiki, there is a danger that copyrighted material could be submitted. This is discouraged through the presence of a warning notice on pages about to be saved.

"Please note that all contributions to Ukcider are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see ukcider:Copyrights for details). If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

There's also a page detailing ukcider's own evolving copyright policy and surrounding discussion http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/ukcider_talk:Copyrights

The author intends to present a version of the findings concerning the introduction of a wiki to a Cop to online facilitators' COPS as a future project for comparison with others' work in the same area. Before doing so, the findings will be offered to the ukcider COP members to review in case of possible disagreements.

references:

ukcider wiki, see appendix 4

Extracts from my participation in two related hotseats are included as Appendix 2.

Firstly I asked for any experience of Distributed Action Research, and was reassured to hear that although Bob Dick hadn't done any formally, he felt it was a valid and useful thing to do. "It seems to me that this is a situation for which action research is well suited"

It was useful for me to explain my goal, "to pool knowledge creating a comprehensive and continually upto date national guide" and fears "I'm anticipating some resistance"

Looking back, I can now say that the goal is well within sight already and the resistance failed to materialise, but the observation "I know I'd be reluctant to modify a WIKI unless I was assured that I knew the material I was adding. I think I'd also want to feel that people would be accepting of it." has been verified by the way in which several people have sometimes asked for guidance or "permission" in the COP before making structural changes. eg

"Just added a couple of entries and tweaked a couple more, and was wondering if the ukcider wiki is as it says a ukcider wiki...? Just occurred to me that the Clytha isn't on there, nor are there any other pubs in Wales.. or Scotland.... I'm assuming that this is a uk-wide wiki? "   http://tinyurl.com/7ydmg

Bob then offered some advice "I think that if I were in your position I'd set up an email list to discuss the WIKI and its use." which I considered, but decided not to take unless events proved it necessary later. After explaining my reasoning, Bob agreed it would be simpler to keep to a single mailing list and that it would be quickly discovered if it were the wrong choice, which in the event didn't happen. I think what neither of us understood at the time, is that discussion about the WIKI can also take place on the wiki itself, in discussion pages parallel with the content pages, and that this is in fact the most appropriate place to hold such discussions.eg

is there any kind of 'calendar' feature that could be used to display the info on events? I do think it's useful to have this displayed by area, but it would be most useful to me to be able to see at a glance what's on during particular months, rather than searching through text. I don't know if this kind of thing is available? --Tania McMillan 19:47 8 Mar 2005

How about creating sections for each Month, and then splicing up the Wales info into the month? It's always going to be a bit tricky separating future from past events, and annual events from one-offs. --Andy 19:48, 8 Mar 2005 (GMT)

I created an experimental page to try this out here [[Calendar]] what do you think? --Andy 11:38, 9 Mar 2005 (GMT)

http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Talk:Current_events

I am quite happy with the balance of wiki-related discussion which is currently spread between the COP mailing list, where it serves to remind less active members of the existence of the wiki, and on the Wiki itself where details can be gone into which might be boring to those not involved.

The Pam Moule hotseat looked promising since the introduction stated that a doctoral thesis had just been submitted considering whether students of the healthcare professions could work as communities of practice online. I asked whether the COPs she worked with included healthcare practitioners but lost interest when it turned out they were merely learning communities of students and non-practising lecturers.

Sarah Jones offered "My interest stems from the terminology of CoP being used. I suppose I see it as a sub division of a Community of Enquiry (CoE), which for me is an overarching term I would give any community, which is formed or forming with learning at it?s core. CoP for me has a more specific meaning, if we follow Wenger?s (1998) definition. I see Ultraversity as CoE, mostly, and only occasionally as a CoP."

which I would broadly agree with, accepting that learners can sometimes form a COP around the practice of learning. Pam's further response suggests that the development of genuine COPS in the health service for learners and practitioners is not yet being researched nor implemented, perhaps lagging behind the interest shown by some in the fields of education and business.

references:

ukcider wiki - see appendix 4
ukcider mailing list - see appendix 4

Ultraversity hotseats:

Dick, B 2005; Moule, P 2005 see appendix 2

My main topic is to investigate if I can bring benefits to a Community of Practice through the provision of a Wiki.

Important sub-topics include the use of SMART tasks for getting things done and the use of a collaborative online goal-setting tool ( 43things ) for monitoring the smart tasks and for peer review.

The context is described in part 2 of a series of blog entries I wrote about Communities of Practice.

http://blog.ultralab.net/~blogger/andy/archives/001244.html

The community was migrated to a different platform in 2004 which caused some unexpected disruption, but the core group of activists remains intact. The migration was documented in a blog entry with comments here:

http://blog.ultralab.net/~blogger/andy/archives/000558.html

The quantitative posting history data mapped across the two platforms is illustrated below

below: ukcider on yahoogroups monthly posting stats

( 1995 figure is simply a date error )

below: ukcider on new googlegroups, monthly posting stats

The above data gives an idea of the kind of timescale I am prepared to work with. The mailing list did nothing much for the first year, established itself in year 3 and came into its own in year 5. The wiki could develop much more quickly given that the community already exists, or it may have to encompass a similar timescale. This project is really only about the very beginning.

The enquiry is to see if it is possible to install a dedicated Wiki site with a view to creating a comprehensive and uptodate knowledge base on the subject of the COP. It's important to me because the phenomenal success of projects using wikis such as Wikipedia suggests that collaborative editing over the internet may be a powerful force for change, empowering ordinary people as consumers, against the narrower interests of traditional publishers. I shall attempt to bring this about on a small scale with a narrow subject ( real cider ) about which I am enthusiastic, in order to gain knowledge and experience which may then be applied more widely.

references:

Andy Roberts Blog - see appendix 4

1) Communities of Practice

I wrote a 4 part series of articles on my blog starting with the criteria for Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, giving examples, questioning the criteria and offering a complementary theory about "communities of identity"

The identification of ukcider as a genuine COP makes it potentially suitable for the project of eventually accumulating all human knowledge about the subject in one place through collaborative editing on the wiki.

2) Wiki

Not everybody has heard of Wikis yet, so where do they come from, who invented wikis?

Some would say that the concept of Wiki was present in the original
vision for the World Wide Web intended by its inventor Sir Tim
Berners-Lee. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/, but then the people who
programmed the first browsers didn't bother to implement the "edit"
function. I don't know if that's exactly true, but Berners-Lee does
seem to be behind the whole push towards "the Semantic Web" so it
seems likely.

The first Wiki named as such was invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

The phenomenon which has brought serious credibility to Wiki is the enormously successful project called "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia". From a beginning as recent as 2001, on the 18th March 2005 Wikipedia published its 500,000th article in the English language and issued this press release:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th article in the English-language Wikipedia, its project to create a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia. The article was about "Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union." The total of 500,000 articles far exceeds any other encyclopedia project. At the average of 2,500 characters per article, this is 1.25 gigabytes of raw text, which if printed double-sided would form a stack about 66 feet or over 6 stories tall. [...]
Wikipedia is a comprehensive online reference that has won acclaim and awards for its detailed coverage of current events and popular culture, its usability, and its community of contributors. It receives millions of visits each day.
Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, recently described Wikipedia as "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future." BBC News calls it "One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line," and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The Font of All Knowledge."

The person behind the Wikipedia project is Jimmy Wales, recently interviewed for Slashdot.

3) Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encycs by ewanrg
Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

Jimmy Wales:
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.

7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?

Jimmy Wales:
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

Critics of Wikipedia

Criticism tends to focus on the absence of academic authority and the quality of articles produced through the global editing method. Not surprisingly, some criticism has been published by a former Britannica Editor-in-chief ( Robert McHenry, 2004) The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

More seriously, criticism of anti-elitism has been vaunted by an ex-wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger ( 2004 )

My own view at this stage is that the seemingly anarchic group editing method does seem to work as a practical proposition, no matter how counter-intuitive this may be, or how serious the implication for vested interests both commercial and academic. My only criticism might be that the group authoring process, in order to resolve controversies can reduce the style of writing to a rather dry and factual one, which might limit the audience to that of encyclopaedia type fact-books and works of reference, leaving plenty of scope for individual authorship and personal commentary elsewhere.

Synthesis

What I've learned about larger scale wiki projects is that the wiki is not just a tool or a website but can be both the product of and producer of communities. Wiki communities hold together because people care about the wiki project, they care about the subject being researched and written up on their wiki. There is communication, domain, sometimes practice but definitely a common enterprise in communally growing the breadth and depth of the wiki, and possibly even a hint of identity - some call themselves 'Wikipedians'. It seems possible therefore, that the widespread adoption of Wiki technology would enable and foster a myriad of new global communities of practice, with individuals arriving through search engines at a website which hosts the knowledge they need, staying long enough to recognise the unfinished nature of it, contributing something from their own speciality and by doing so stepping gradually into membership of a COP. But these COPs will not be like the secretive exclusive guilds of old, keeping their knowledge within their own membership, they will be adding to the overall pool of accessible human knowledge open to anybody in the world with the capability to connect to the physical network.

references:

Andy Roberts blog - see appendix 4

Berners-Lee, T.. (). Tim Berners-Lee. World Wide Web Consortium. Available: URL http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

Wales et al . (2005). Ward Cunningham. Wikipedia. Available: URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

Wales et al. (2005). Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article. Wikipedia. Available: URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

Wales et al. (2004). Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Slashdot. Available: URL http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/1351230. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

McHenry, R. (2005). The Faith-Based Encyclopedia. TECH CENTRAL STATION. Available: URL http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. Last accessed 21 MARCH 2005.

Sanger, L. (2004). Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. kuro5hin. Available: URL http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

Initial 'Plan'

I started off with a vision in the form of "wouldn't it be nice if...." and no idea as to how far I might be able to travel along the journey towards that goal, nor in what real direction it might take me. This is a perfectly valid Action Enquiry methodology within the realms of emergent research. The flexibility of cyclical research allows me to operate intuitively, pursuing multiple branches of investigation simultaneously and documenting learning wherever it arises.

I am initially guided by 3 beliefs.

1) That a wiki can be a powerful tool for amassing collaborative knowledge, but you might not want to be reliant on 'free' servers.

2) That collaborative enterprise is more enjoyable than solo study.

3) That SMART tasks have been suggested as a useful tool by both education and business trainers.

So my plan is to use the collaborative goal setting tool "43things" to outline SMART tasks under peer review with a goal of achieving a successful wiki for ukcider. The project is very real and will not be abandoned once the research module is completed.

I hope to learn a lot about

*the process of setting up the wiki, ( technical skills)
*helping the community towards collaborative knowledge building ( facilitation)
*developing an understanding of the relationship between an existing Community of Practice and the developing wiki. ( advancing theory )

Emergent Plan

The emergent plan can be traced as a series of entries and comments relating to SMART tasks made in the 43things environment.

As at 27 Feb 2005 the history of the project looks a bit like this:

use SMART tasks to take steps towards my goals
track my SMART tasks for the next module using 43 things
SMART 01 - check out options and prices at current domain host, including transfer out
SMART 02 - try uploading a moinmoin Wiki
        overall plan

SMART 03 - find a new hosting service for the website
SMART04 - install MediaWiki at dc-hosting
         getting closer
        Wayhay!!!!!! it's working tra la la

use 43things to develop collaborative Ultraversity work (with 6 others)
SMART05 - plan the next phase

A slight change of plan
SMART05.2 - revised plan
SMART05.3 - more positive developments

SMART06 Write a literature review for the action enquiry (with 2 others)
SMART07 - update old site
SMART08 - questionnaire

Nice one
SMART08 prototype questionnaire
SMART08-1 analyse prototype feedback

At one point I started to feel that the emergent project was getting a little unwieldy with eddy currents branching off in a way which may become unmanageable so I drew a chart to give myself a visual overview and this made me happy again.

Posting the above diagram to the Firstclass Learning Community in response to a question about cycles led to the following reply from a 3rd year student:

Hi andy
Just wanted to say I loved the way you presented your work.
It was very clear and easy to follow.
Thank you for sharing at a time when I am so bogged down with everything I had lost sight of the most logical way to present some data.
It really has helped me think about how to present some data I've been struggling with - thanks again!
Helena x

references:

aroberts on 43things - see appendix 4

Since I've been using a qualitative, fuzzy, emergent system for this project the data has been arriving in different forms and at all stages of the process. One of the advantages of a Distributed Action Research is that the data is automatically saved. The mailing list is copied to an online archive. The SMART tasks, my comments, and discussions with peers are saved on the server at 43things. The wiki keeps a record of all edits made to it and previous states. Blog entries have permalinks. Questionnaire data is received and stored in my online searchable email account. Other data includes the original ukcider website and the developing wiki itself.

Some people would feel the need to gather all this together into one place but I am quite happy to leave it where it is, safely stored and backed up, then link to it or retrieve it as and when required. The advantage of this method is to save a lot of time and space, reduce the possibility of copying errors and to give the reader a fuller more realistic experience of the work. The disadvantages are that a reliable internet connection is required, the report cannot be viewed from a stand-alone CD playing computer, and there may be problems with accessing the data in the same state as it was when the report was written if it is read many months or years into the future without a 'snapshot' having been taken. .

Questionnaire

I chose to use an open questionnaire format, because I knew there would be a very uneven level of understanding about the wiki amongst the interviewees so any quantitative analysis would only relate to that single snapshot of time when it was undertaken. I wanted to promote participation and solicit individual opinions, not conduct a survey. ( note that in the event, only the prototype questionnaire was conducted during the period of the Action Enquiry module, for reasons explained in entry Smart08 - delay questionnaire and further reflection )

references:

aroberts on 43things - see appendix 4

I think the most significant data I have is the comparison between the old static website and the new wiki, one month or so into its existence.

The original ukcider "recommendations" page was built up sporadically over 5 years by extracting information as it flowed past on the mailing list. Website editors traditionally appeal to their readers "if you have any suggested additions please email them to me" but nobody ever does, or extremely rarely. So that page got stuck at about 42 pubs, some out of date, from only 13 counties.

The Cider Pub Guide - which is the equivalent page on the Wiki has taken off in a spectacular fashion, since 31st January 2005 reaching 100 individual pubs listed by 3rd March, and accelerating afterwards with the 7th March seeing 31 edits made and 3 discussions in the one day. By then already 29 Counties were represented, with two or three of them substantial enough to require a page of their own. The History page for the cider pub guide suggests that 8 named users and countless anonymous people have been involved in the compilation. The counter on March 7th said "this page has been accessed 1089 times". By only 12th March, the pub count had risen to 166 - a growth by two thirds in only 9 days, and I started to worry about exceeding bandwidth quotas for the web hosting I had purchased.

The equivalent professional printed publication "CAMRAs Good Cider Guide" listed around 500 outlets but hasn't been reviewed since it was first published in year 2000. If the rate of development of the Wiki version continues, then it will only be a matter of weeks before the online cider pub guide, driven by a COP and enabled through a wiki, is more comprehensive and accurate than any existing or future printed publication or single-author website . This very positive result seems to confirm the faith that Jimmy Wales and others have in the advantages of this process over traditional authoring and publishing, not just for encyclopaedia but for all sorts of reference works.

How can the different fortunes of the ukcider wiki and the Ultraversity one be explained?

I reflected on the questions posed by peer review partner Eve Thirkle :

and on the data from the Ultrastudents prototype questionnaire (Appendix 3) and came up with the following conclusions.

ukcider

• passion for the topic, trust in leadership and each other.

as evidenced by the absence of expected resistance.

• strong, mature community already existent.
  

dating from 1999.

• sound decisions made, based on informed advice and increasing experience

supported by the Action Enquiry process

• superior wiki software

  informed by Wikipedia experience, mediawiki facilitates page discussions, user logins and watchlists.

• people are there because they want to be

  self-selected voluntary community

Ultraversity Wiki

• weak community

ultrastudents community sidelined by official Firstclass groups

• inexperienced facilitation

Following the technical demise of the Ultrastudents Swiki, the php wiki which was eventually supplied by Ultraversity lacked a clear purpose, identity or ownership and was steered in different directions from using personal pages and blog plugin comments, to becoming a receptacle for FAQ information.

• hostility from LFs

First there was non participation by LFs, and then outright hostility telling researchers not to bother with it, portraying it as too technical, a distraction from the real community, an unofficial optional extra and then wanting to use blogs for the purpose of retaining persistent data.

• lack of passion for the topic

Without a close community to care for it, no individual has enough enthusiasm to put lots o effort into developing the ultraversity wiki, so it gets abandoned.

• people are there because they need the degree

  Only registered students are involved in the course and these are all very busy people with full time jobs as well.

ukcider wiki activity

Another set of data which I thought worth looking at :

Quantitative data from the ukcider Wiki “Recent Changes”

Numerical count of activity - number of people active per day and number of edits made per day.

method

I changed the parameters to the Recent Changes URL to give me a list of edits made over the past 41 days since the wiki began. I counted the number of edits per day and approximated the number of unique people active per day ( There is no way of telling how unique they really are, since one anonymous person may login more than once with different IP addresses )
I then transferred the data onto a spreadsheet and plotted two line graphs. The first shows the activity level increasing sporadically over the period, the second shows a steady increase in the total number of edits.

conclusion

The data shows how the Wiki has taken off, without revealing a great deal more than we already know. The only interesting patterns to me are the two periods of lull. The first occurs between 11th 14th february and is followed by a natural recovery, but not quite back to the levels of the initial burst. The second lull is between 22nd 26th February, and is followed by a sustained renewal of activity on a higher level than before.
If we look at the corresponding days on the ukcider mailing list, there were only two messages during the first lull, and neither relating to the wiki, whereas in the second lull I made a conscious intervention to explain a bit more about the wiki and increase the take up.

So the quantitative data aligns with the intervention suggesting that a few people responded to it, by becoming new wiki editors and beginning a renewed period of increased activity, possibly enough to bring it to a tipping point.

references:

ukcider website, ukcider wiki - see appendix 4

amazon online bookshop

Ultrastudents prototype questionnaire data - see appendix 3

Who learned what?

Ukcider list members learned that we don't have to wait for somebody else to publish a printed guide - we can make our own online using the wiki. Those who had a go, learned that editing a wiki is not difficult. They learned that previous revisions for each page are retained, so nothing can get lost or broken.

Peer review partners learned that 43things can be used to plan each stage of a project, that they can leave comments and suggestions and be alerted to new entries through RSS.

Learning Facilitator learned that progress through the module can be observed in this way, but that RSS feeds are subject to hiccups and duplication.

Some ultrastudents members learned that there might be some useful resources on the Ultraversity wiki, while others learned that it probably isn't worth bothering with.

What have I learned?

Wiki Software Installation

There are many types of wiki software, but most of the installation instructions assume you are the owner of the computer you wish to install it on, rather than just a customer of a web service provider.
*A lot of web service providers aren't suitable for installing a wiki on anyway.
You need PHP or PERL scripting, and python for moinmoin, and access to set access permissions for just about any wiki
* Mediawiki is the software which has been developed by the Wikipedia project. It's supposed to be easy to install but took me three hours of hard concentration. Once up and running though, it became apparent that this was the cleverest choice. You know the software is going to be robust, reliable and scalable, but best of all it has some of the experience of Wikipedia community building, by far the largest wiki project in history, re-input back into the design of the software. So the provision to separate content from discussion is catered for automatically through the "talk" link and "discussion" tabs. The most needed statistics for helping to manage a large wiki are available through the Special pages. users can create their own "watchlists" to keep an eye on their own speciality pages. These sophisticated functions are the sign of a mature product, but there's nothing bloated or market-orientated about mediawiki either. It's an endorsement of the open source methodology.

Wiki content structure - seeding

I learned eventually to resist the temptation to over-organise the structure of fledgling wiki content. Creating empty or 'stub' pages, and links to pages which haven't been created yet is a strong temptation when you want to watch the wiki grow, but it makes the wiki content less useful and frustrating to the reader, and therefore less likely that they might become a contributor. I learned this mainly through a single long conversation with Evan Roberts which is transcribed on my blog here: Expert Ants in Wiki World

What Evan is saying, in a nutshell, is the antithesis to the old "build it and they will come" argument, slightly changed to "organise it, and they will join in" :

"seed pages are bad - wikipedia came to the same conclusion"

This is backed up by a commentary on Wikipedia itself http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Stub_Pages

"Simply encourage the creation of longer pages over shorter ones. Adopt the stance of "No page is better than a stub page" and discourage people from creating a new topic unless they're willing to write at least a full paragraph on it, and definitely start discouraging the creation of more empty lists."

Evan again:

"The main thing with wikis is to only create new pages when you have content
to fill the page"

"people like organising, and the people who do the organising are more inclined to feel closer to the project and contribute more in general, so by organising all the structure yourself, people won't feel so inclined to help out"

These ideas caused me to immediately change my practice and I now feel that contributed crucially to the early success of the ukcider wiki.

SMART tasks

I learned that using the SMART system helped me to achieve difficult tasks important to the project and mostly on time. Without the systematic approach I feel I may possibly have wavered at some of the early stages and possibly looked for an easier project to do, but the setting down of manageable steps seems to help maintain motivation and focus.

43things.com

This proved to be an enjoyable useful tool for setting SMART tasks, commenting on progress and conversing with peers as illustrated below:

Gina replied

"I can look at your progress and evidence of analysis. Seems a great way of planning a module"

Effect of Wiki on COP

At first I thought of the wiki as being merely a tool which the COP can use to accumulate information but during the Action Enquiry I learned that mediaWiki can facilitate community by itself, so the implications for the longer term development of the email list and its relationship to the wiki could be significant. At the time of writing this report it is too early to answer longer term important questions which are emerging such as

* "will the wiki diminish traffic on the COP mailing list?"
* "will the Wiki become a centre of community in itself" and
* "if so, how will the two centres of community - wiki and COP - complement or conflict with each other?"

The findings which have been established already though, are all positive

* The addition of the wiki has been well received by all COP members who have commented.
* Anticipated resistance or dissent has failed to materialise.
* Brief discussions about the mechanics, formatting and content of wiki entries have taken place on the mailing list without this causing any visible problems and to the benefit of shared understanding and publicity for the wiki.
* The content of the Wiki is consistently increasing in quantity and quality as a growing number of contributors are managing to add useful information, create user accounts and take part in some discussion on the wiki

Facilitation style

I learned much about my own developing facilitation style during this Distributed Action Research project. Mainly by the process of documenting interventions and decisions as they happened on 43things, but also through experiencing a genuinely purposeful community wiki for the first time. The advice from Evan about empty pages, stubs, and over-organising helped me to avoid classic mistakes and steer a more fruitful course. As a later observation however, it has to be said that the people using the wiki do seem to be more likely to add information where there is a clear existing format to follow and they would appear reticent to create new pages or restructure existing ones. Thus the job of the wiki facilitator is to tread a very fine line between setting down examples and over-organising, based on an understanding of the membership and topic, retaining a flexibility to act swiftly when necessary but also building up the necessary will-power to resist the strong temptation to keep going in and sorting everything out - that's a hard one.

Action Enquiry Process

I'm glad that I was able to begin the Action Enquiry without having pre-determined plans as to what was going to happen, because I feel this enabled much richer learning and acting. The systematic use of small scale SMART tasks seemed to propel the project forward at a faster and more controlled pace, even though several plans and dates were changed along the way. From this I have learned that it is better to make plans and then change them than to work entirely unplanned or else spend so long trying to make plans foolproof that it defeats the object.

The way in which the project could be envisaged as three separate but interconnected branches of enquiry running simultaneously was also helpful. It meant that even if two of them came to a dead end, there would be still be plenty of scope for analysis, learning and further development and the implication is that a greater element of risk can be taken which then presents more opportunity for serendipity. For example, the Ultraversity team goal "use 43things to develop collaborative Ultraversity work" might have taken off with the involvement of 9 people and many more invited, or the prototype Questionnaire to Ultrastudents might have re-invigorated the Ultraversity Wiki, but if neither of them do so within the timescale of the project I still have the main ukcider wiki leg.

The 43things structure lends itself nicely to incorporating reflection into the cycles, since one can annotate one's own entries in a way that would seem a bit odd on a normal blog. For instance, at one point I had planned to prepare an announcement post to the COP mailing list which would kick off the public phase of the wiki development. I posted the announcement to 43 things as well, and then later when I reflected on the way in which it had completely missed the mark, I came back and criticized my own announcement and methods right there on the goal:

Overall I feel my understanding of Action Research is much clearer as a result of looking at theory, taking part in and reading the entire Bob Dick hotseat, and most importantly through practice during a very real and useful project.

references:

Andy Roberts blog - see appendix 4

aroberts on 43things - see appendix 4

ukcider mailing list and wiki - see appendix 4

Hotseat - see appendices 1 and 4

Wales et al. (2005). Kill the Stub Pages. Wikimedia meta-wiki. Available: URL http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Stub_Pages. Last accessed 21 March 2005.

I have long understood the potential of peer reviews, and attempted to encourage them from the outset of the Ultraversity degree course with mixed results. During year one I became frustrated with only receiving uncritical praise from researchers and tried to institute a more formal exploration of critical review. I wrote a page on the original Ultrastudents sWiki http://ultrastudents.swiki.net/15 around January 2004

"Peer review can be a very valuable learning process. Other people can spot mistakes and shortcomings so much more easily than we can ourselves, and offer suggestions which we can then either take onboard or ignore.
The only problem is that people are naturally reluctant to be critical, and prefer to offer simple encouragement. That's nice, but it doesn't help us to improve our work. Perhaps the way to overcome this is to initiate a more formal process where you submit a piece of work for review and say "this is for peer-review, constructive criticism welcome"
Reading & reviewing someone else's work is a great way of clarifying & challenging your own ideas, but it also takes time and effort to do a fair job.
Group peer-review can be a bit different, since it is not necessary for one individual to review the entire piece of work in one go. What one person misses another may notice. So even small snippets of criticism, just picking up on a typo or a broken link for instance, are worth posting because if enough people contribute a little, the author will gain a lot.
Work submitted for peer review can be on your own website, uploaded into the FILES section of the yahoogroup, posted direct to the mailing list or perhaps presented as a WIKI page linked to this one? (in which case the review can take place on the page itself)
In any case, a notice should be sent to the mailing list with "submission for peer review" included in the header in order to let everyone know that constructive criticism is requested.
Guidelines for reviewers
1) Only review people's work when they have specifically asked for a peer-review, and bear in mind any special requests they may make.
2) Try to strike a good balance between negative and positive comments. Too much praise and flattery can be misleading as well as nauseating but when criticising it is all important to be tactful, since in a text-only medium it is easy to interpret remarks as a personal attack even though none is intended.

Since that time, the idea of group peer review has shifted onto the Firstclass platform where it works in a more fragmented way split between various small groups and often with work submitted as Word attachments which are difficult to annotate. Individuals have also struck up relationships of trust such that work can be reviewed in very small groups such as the one I share with 2 or 3 others.

One problem I have found recurrently with the small peer review group is that the length of time between arriving at a first draft of a report for review and the deadline for submission is often quite short, and it is exactly during this time when peer review is most needed that the peer reviewers themselves are also very busy with their own reports.

During this last Action Research module however, the process of peer review has developed again, in my case through the use of 43things. By making all of my plans, findings, twists and turns public in that forum, with people following via RSS I have enjoyed a wider opportunity for peers to make comments and suggestions not so much on the content of this report, but on the developing Action Research process as it is happening. This means that the reviewers are not just commenting on the writing, but need to be acknowledged as minor collaborators in the success of the action research wiki project, a process which fits in well with the ideally collaborative nature of Action Research anyway.

For my part, I have made contributions to my partners' work mainly through Firstclass group emails and chats, as and when requested, to the benefit of my own understanding as well as helping them.

references:

Roberts et al . (2004). Peer-review. Ultrastudents Wiki Pages. Available: URL http://ultrastudents.swiki.net/15 Last accessed 21 March 2005.

By choosing a Distributed Action Research project based around one of my developing spheres of enterprise, I managed to avoid being undermined by weaknesses in my day job and in types of communication I am less comfortable with. The knowledge and strengths I have developed however, will enable me to tackle those issues with a renewed confidence in future projects, which will then reverse the negative impact that so much online activity has had on aspects of face-to-face work.

The difficult installation of the software was an opportunity to revive skills which I haven't deployed in such a way for many years, such as deeply focused concentration, courage in exploring deep into new territory, and holding faith in deductive reasoning above emotional distraction. This might be an important rediscovery with implications for my choice of future direction.

I feel I have developed my leadership and online facilitation skills by several degrees, recognising that others have more confidence in me than I previously thought, learning how to resist intervening sometimes, and daring to make mistakes.

I've developed my understanding of the usefulness of Action Research as a systematic approach to getting things done and effecting change, such that I would happily choose this approach now for future projects where the direction of enquiry is not fully known beforehand.

My next steps are:

1) to take what I've learned about the Wiki software and techniques and apply it in my workplace with colleagues. This will be in the form of a school intranet and extranet based on wikis and blogs, with a long action research project aimed at involving lots of other people. This may take up much of my 3rd year Ultraversity activities and exhibition.

2) to take what I've learned about introducing a Wiki to a COP and rewrite it into a form which I feel I can share with Online Facilitators in their own COPs in order to compare and contrast with others' experiences, and indeed to encourage others to try a similar venture. This might be for ILM2

3) to continue facilitating the ukcider COP and WIKI as it develops towards becoming the definitive source on the subject, with a view to encouraging more lengthy written articles to complement the 'list' type information which has been the vehicle for getting it well underway.

4) to revisit the ultrastudents prototype questionnaire responses, take into account all that I have learned and see if it might be possible to make some changes to the Ultraversity wiki which will give it a new lease of life and recognition.