Background

This report follows on from my Action Enquiry project undertaken earlier the same year into the provision of a Wiki website for a Community of Practice ( COP). At that time I stated "My main topic is to investigate if I can bring benefits to a Community of Practice through the provision of a Wiki". The COP in question is centered around a genuine Etienne Wenger style community of craft cidermakers, orchardists and specialist retailers. The Wiki software was successfully chosen and installed and initial results reported looked very promising. This report focuses on the subsequent fortunes of this one specific case during the period immediately following implementation in January 2005 up until the date of writing in June 2005 - nearly 5 months of data.

Case Study

The research method chosen is the method of a "case study" as depicted by Bassey (1999) with a view to collecting sufficient data to enable me to do some of the following:

"to explore significant features of the case,
to create plausible interpretations of what is found,
to test for the trustworthiness of these interpretations,
to construct a worthwhile argument or story,
to relate the argument or story to any relevant research in the literature,
to convey convincingly to an audience this argument or story, and
to provide an audit trail by which other researchers may validate or challenge the findings, or construct alternative arguments."

Denscombe (1998: 36-7) explains that 'the extent to which findings from the case study can be generalised to other examples in the class depends on how far the case study example is similar to others of its type', so the researcher must obtain data on the significant features of the both the instance and the class in order to demonstrate where the case study example fits in relation to the overall picture.

With this is mind, I aim to depict the specific features of this instance of a (COP + WIKI) in order to identify the type of case where it may be reasonable to expect similar processes and outcomes.

references:

Bassey, M. (1999). Case study research in educational settings. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Densombe, M. (1998). The good research guide. Maidenhead. Second edition, Open University Press, .

Bell, J. (1993). Doing Your Research Project. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

2) Literature review

For my preceding Action Enquiry report I used literature about COPS to characterise the ukcider community and then literature about the origin of WIKIs and the success of Wikipedia to inform my introduction of a Wiki. This time I am looking for ideas and theory about the relationship between the two, the effect of the tool on the community and the implications of community on the wiki.

KM

Being a very newly emerging field it is very difficult to find any relevant books or academic papers, so the search is conducted on the web, making particular use of blog searches. As a slight digression perhaps, by defining a wiki as a type of Knowledge Management (KM) tool, it is possible to find literature on the relationship between COPS and KM such as "The Duality of Knowledge" by Hildreth and Kimble, 2002 in which they argue that "knowledge resides in people, not in machines or documents." which if true, places limits on the ambitions of Wikipedia and indeed the ukcider Wiki to become repositories of all human knowledge on their respective subjects. Certainly the concept of "hard" and "soft" types of knowledge is a useful one, suggesting that only hard knowledge - such as the ukcider Pub guide - can be easily extracted and put onto the wiki whereas soft knowledge - how to run a successful orchard or make an award winning perry, which doubtlessly exists within the COP, may be more difficult to extract and make explicit for posterity on the wiki.

MailingListThenWiki

A breakthrough in my search this time was to discover a significant meta-wiki ( a wiki about wikis and communities ) called "Community Wiki". One particular page thereupon related to my work - MailingListThenWiki

"You start with just a MailingList. Email is a solid platform. Everyone has email tools.

[...]
So the strategy is:
1. Make a wiki and a mailing list.
2. Get everyone who's interested onto a mailing list. Encourage discussion to take place there, if people ever have relevant thoughts. This establishes a "wire," that people are listening to.
3. As ideas are discussed, start summarizing them on the wiki, and say you're doing so, from the mailing list.
With time, WikiCanonicalization? will kick in, and you'll have a community. Yay!"

Although this doesn't parallel exactly with mine, since I started with an already existing mailing list community, it would appear to accord with my experience of working from a mailing list to evolve a wiki as a natural strategy.

IncSub

James Farmer is amongst the vanguard of early adopters advocating the use of blogs and wikis in education. In a recent article a commenter 'Bernd' takes issue with a section of his article where James has stated:

"but perhaps the most important thing to understand about implementing a wiki in a real / virtual environment is that it will NOT help you with communication." ( Farmer's emphasis)

Bernd's experience appears to be different to Farmer's as he feels that "Wikis therefore support discourse". Farmer counters with "reformatting isn’t actually effective communication" and Bernd replies "Discussion Boards and Usenet are just too hard to read after the discussion has ended."

My viewpoint

The difference between the two viewpoints may be largely cultural, with Farmer being fanatical about blogging and Bernd's coming from Wikipedia and other community wikis. My own views on this are not yet fully decided. I was initially informed by the analogy of 'stocks and flows' and saw Wikis as being limited to being repositories of information. I was then opened to the idea that discourse can take place on wikis, either in amongst the data itself or separated onto adjoining discussion pages as provided for by the media wiki software. I wrote in my earlier report:

"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"

At this stage, I am retreating slightly from the idea of community existing on the wiki and moving more towards expecting the COP to reside mainly on the mailing list rather than abandon it or straddle the two spaces equally. It is of vital importance for the healthy development of online communities that facilitators manage to establish a correct theory as to the most appropriate use of these tools and their effect, which is why I am studying the implications of implementing wikis for COPs once more.

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LA3 quantitative

Activity levels on the Wiki and mailing list for the period being studied are depicted in the two graphs below

The period of the introduction of the Wiki has coincided with an increase in traffic on the mailing list, to consistently nearly double what is was both immediately beforehand, and for the same period the previous year.

This 100% increase in emails on the list cannot be accounted for by discussions about the wiki itself, as these represent only a small percentage of the total traffic, around 10%.

For details of method, data, calculation and initial interpretation please see:
LA3 - quantitative ( opens in new window)

LA3 qualitative

Bearing in mind the way in which many-to-many forums amplify voices of dissent, a strong indication that the wiki has brought positive benefit to the COP is the absence of any negative feedback or criticism of its introduction. This kind of negative proof would not stand up by itself, but when triangulated with the Face to Face meeting experiences, the statistics "There have been a total of 18,245 page views, and 1715 page edits since the wiki was setup" and the anecdotal positive comments such as

" I was delighted to find the Cider Pub Guide - have thought for a long
time that the web could do much better at providing a guide to
cider-friendly pubs than any of the extant print publications. Will
post any more I can remember."

then the evidence becomes significant.

At some stage a survey or questionnaire would help to discover a lot more about the level of awareness of the Wiki in the COP, attitudes and suggestions.

The qualitative analysis of where the wiki is mentioned on the mailing list shows mainly conversations where people are getting on with using it, helping each other and soliciting further contributions - all community building activities, rather than evaluative discussion. The two extended discussions ( whether to insist on postcodes and editing other people's entries) both sorted themselves out in a friendly and positive way.

For details of method, list of threads, categories of type of reference and analysis please see:
LA3 - qualitative ( opens in new window)

LA4 sharing

I want to reach out and compare my findings with other people who are in a position to or have already introduced a wiki to a COP, in order to validate my findings and perhaps provide encouragement. At the point of writing however, I have not yet received much response like that. As far as I am aware the main discussion areas for COPs practitioners are the yahoogroups mailing lists com prac and online facilitation so I ventured a request to those. ( There is also Etienne Wenger's CPsquare and if anybody would like to sponsor a membership for me I will investigate further).

The response from one of the online facilitators ( who is active on both the comprac and onfac lists ) seems to corroborate my findings at some level:

"As a person relatively new at wikis in a CoP, I can attest that I had your same experience."

The discovery of a fellow Ultraversity student who is using Wikis, contacted through a 'hotseat' forum, promises to be fruitful. The case he described as a "Wiki for a cooking COP" sounded as if it may be a useful comparison, but upon receiving further details I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to parallel the same type as my case study since I believe it was an attempt to create a Wiki based on a community which had already become defunct. "only my friends were active, none of the forumers". Further clarification is needed to check this.

For more details please see LA4 - sharefindings ( opens in new window)

LA5 reflections

method:

Reflecting on the case study findings didn't come easily this time. I attempted to choose a model for reflection based on previous studies ( year 1 report 3 ) but felt the reflective models of Gibbs and Kolb to be geared towards critical incidents and artefacts and less appropriate to case study data, so I ended up simply jotting down some free thought and capturing what I could remember of a reflective conversation (as in Pask, Gordon )

findings:

I embraced the concept of Hard and Soft knowledge as a spectrum, and applied it to the case being studied, concluding that the wiki will only be able to capture knowledge of the type which begins at the 'Hard' end of the spectrum and continues somewhere into the middle, but will never reach the most 'Soft' end. Therefore the mailing list conversations continue to play an important, probably vital role no matter how successful or popular the wiki may become. This insight has important implications for the impact which my role has on the COP. A facilitator who failed to understand correct theory about 'Stocks and Flows', and about 'Hard and Soft knowledge' might deliberately wind down or neglect the mailing list in favour of the wiki (or vice versa) and thus inadvertently kill off a vital part of the community.

I also managed to clarify to some extent the problem of drawing conclusions from research, about cause and effect. One case study by itself cannot establish a relationship between actions and subsequent observations - 'Change this and that happens' unless further cases can establish a convincing trend, or else the underlying mechanism which links the two in that order can be identified and shown to be happening in the process somehow. It sounds obvious, but from my experience it's a common pitfall and I feel this is something which Action Researchers in particular need to be wary of.

For the raw reflective writing please see LA5 - reflections ( opens in new window)

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* During the period of the case study, the Wiki was well received and continued to grow and develop, but at a steadying pace rather than an accelerating one.

* During the period of the case study, the mailing list traffic flowed at a consistently increased rate compared with the period beforehand and the same period for the previous year. The increase is not small, amounting to nearly 100% (double). This may or may not be coincidental.

* At the time of writing, not enough corroborative evidence from other cases have been acquired to establish a generalisable trend concerning the benefits of providing a wiki for a COP, but the indications are positive and worth pursuing.

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Out of the two opportunities to design my own Independent Learning Module this year, neither has worked out as well as I had hoped. I strongly welcome the idea of being able to choose my own area of study, and I'm not in the slightest bit afraid of taking responsibility for my own learning, in fact I have had more than enough ideas which would appear to be excellent vehicles to design an ILM for myself around. The problem for me, lies somewhere in the time-shift between having to negotiate a detailed plan, and the execution of said plan. For me, learning is a journey into the unknown and I feel uncomfortably restrained by having to decide in advance before even arriving at base camp, the expected arrival time and exact locations for camp 2 and camp3 etc. I can appreciate the advantage in being able to work like that, especially where there are other people involved, it's just a discipline which I have not so far been able to acquire, due in some measure to a tendency on my part to refuse to acquire it.

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Patchwork Text Guide - Site map

LA3

Appendix

Audit trail

The objective data from which this case study is constructed is freely available to the public:-

The ukcider Wiki and its Recent Changes Page

The ukcider Mailing List Archives at googlegroups2

Previous year's Mailing List Archive at yahoogroups.

Bibliography

Bassey, M. (1999). Case study research in educational settings. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Densombe, M. (1998). The good research guide. Maidenhead. Second edition, Open University Press, .

Bell, J. (1993). Doing Your Research Project. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Pask, G. (1975). Conversation, Cognition, and Learning as described in The Theory Into Practice (TIP) database
URL http://tip.psychology.org/pask.html

Gibbs, (1988) reflective cycle from from Gibbs, 1988 as described in Modular Training Course
http://www.trainer.org.uk/members/theory/process/reflective_cycle.htm
last accessed February 24, 2004)

Smith, M. K. (2001) 'David A. Kolb on experiential learning', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/b-explrn.htm.

Static Listing - exported in Chicago Citation format - Harvard not yet available.
from Furl: category wiki2

• Strand, M., "ASCILITE 2004: Strand, Udas and Lee - design for communities of practice: Eduforge", <http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/strand.html> (25 May. 2005).
  
• Farmer, J, "Blogsavvy - your professional blogging consultant ? IM, wikis and blogs for your business communication", <http://blogsavvy.net/im-wikis-and-blogs-for-your-business-communication> (18 May. 2005).
  
• "CommunityWiki: MailingListThenWiki", <http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/MailingListThenWiki> (24 May. 2005).
  
• Roberto, F "frankie roberto blog - Student Radio Wiki", <http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/440.xhtml> (16 Jun. 2005).
  
• Mayfield R and Good R, "How Working Groups Can Further Connect Without Adding More Technology: Good Interviews Ross Mayfield - Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings", <http://www.masternewmedia.org/2004/04/07/how_working_groups_can_further.htm> (12 Jun. 2005).
  
• "Infoconomy - Search", <http://www.infoconomy.com/pages/search/group103201.adp> (12 Jun. 2005).
  
• "LoicLeMeur Wiki - The european blogosphere", <http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/index.cgi?the_european_blogosphere> (13 Jun. 2005).
  
• "Main Page - 43FoldersWiki", <http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Main_Page> (24 May. 2005).
  
• "MediaPost Publications Home of MediaDailyNews, MEDIA and OMMA Magazines", <http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=30002&Nid=13359&p=217430> (24 May. 2005).
  
• "Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website", <http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html> (13 Jun. 2005).
  
• "Reading Online Articles Section", <http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/luce-kapler/index.html> (15 Jun. 2005).
  
• "The CommunityWiki Blog ? CommunityWiki WikiSpam recommendations", <http://communitywiki.taoriver.net/archives/2005/02/07/communitywiki-wikispam-recommendations#comments> (25 May. 2005).
  
• Paul Hildreth, Chris Kimble, "The duality of knowledge", Professor T.D. Wilson, <http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html> (12 Jun. 2005).
  
• "Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? - Knowledge@Wharton", <http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=1227> (16 Jun. 2005).

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