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We're interested in how wikis can be used to facilitate knowledge sharing within communities. For example, how can a wiki help newcomers get to know a community? Also, how can a wiki help a community share information efficiently? The kind of learning we're interested in here is something like social knowledge rather than content or "book" knowledge. - Jude Yew and Libby Hemphillhelping newcomers learn about a community Our community experiences a great deal of turnover as students and faculty enter and leave the program. New members come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, disparate geographic areas, and are not familiar with the norms and procedures of the School or the University. Knowledge about the School and its environments is distributed among the constituents of our community, and such knowledge can be tremendously helpful for newcomers to succeed in graduate school. Given a wiki's advantages over other collaborative technologies - it captures version changes, allows for distributed administration, and persists - wikis were chosen as a means to organize and share knowledge in our community. Threaded discussion boards force topic-reply structure that can make finding relevant information difficult. Email lists interrupt work and have no persistent record. A wiki's core function is the ability for many people to contribute, edit and archive shared content. It's likely that given the knowledge distributed among members of an academic community that such a technology could prove useful.
Wikis offer a persistent, flexible platform for sharing information as they provide context and distributed administration not previously available for electronic community resources. The history views and comment areas of a wiki allow us to examine the paths through which wiki pages are changed and updated to reflect different opinions, approaches, and policies. Moreland's characterization of transactive memory [1] suggests that anecdotes and informal information sharing hold useful information that is not available from official documents and existing resources. As communities grow, they also learn which tasks are best performed by people. Transactive memory refers to knowledge of individual knowledge and expertise in organizations. Wikis keep track of authors' contributions and provide a record for transactive memory. We expect the wiki to be most useful when it can make practice transparent. For example, by providing examples of informed consent documents on a wiki, these documents serve as a record of the transactive memory regarding the human subject and research guidelines held by more experienced members of an academic community. The wiki's ability to keep track of authors and documents allows users to know who to ask for help with an IRB application while providing them a successful example to follow. We predict that participation in the virtual community surrounding the school wiki will help to develop social and intellectual ties among members in the physical community. By involving the user in the process of creation and collaboration of a community knowledge base, the wiki provides advantages that the physical community cannot. For example, the wiki automatically captures and archives the history of a discussion so that context remains for decisions made. Such a context is crucial in the settlement of disputes and conflict, and also allows the newcomer access and insight into the knowledge held by the community [2]. By providing and studying the online resources and behavior of the SI wiki users, we will uncover new ways to understand our academic life. [1] R. L. Moreland, L. Argote & R. Krishnan (1996). Socially shared cognition at work: Transactive memory and group performance. In J. L. Nye & A. M. Brower (Eds.), What's so social about social cogition? Social cognition research in small groups (pp. 57-84). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. |