Running head: CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE IN A PUBLIC FORUM

 

 

 

 

Constructing Knowledge in a Public Forum:

Student Projects in Wikipedia

Kent L. Norman and Stuart A. Cohn

University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

For many years educators have required students to write term papers and in many cases to work together in teams to complete the project. While these papers constituted original work and often contained innovative ideas, the vast majority of them ended up in file cabinets never to see the light of day. In recent years, a number of educators have used the World Wide Web (WWW) as a forum to allow a broader access to the papers. Internet exposure has had the effect of motivating students to produce better work and create lasting products with pride. However, the websites generated have usually enjoyed very little traffic. In this project, we explored the idea of having students write original articles in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. A total of 16 articles were written for Wikipedia. The students responded to a follow-up survey after the course was over. The results indicated that group projects were well received by the students and that the articles achieved prominence on the Internet. Statistics on the 16 articles were monitored for 9 months following their creation and indicated that the articles remained largely unchanged relative to a control group of articles.
An important part of education is learning how to do library research and to write original works that contribute to the knowledge base of society. Educators have assigned term papers for this purpose and in many cases required students to work together in teams to complete the project. Many of these papers have resulted in original works and often contained innovative ideas. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them have been read only by the instructor of the course and then relegated to file cabinets and eventually shredded after seven years or so.

In recent years, a number of educators have used the World Wide Web (WWW) as a platform to allow a broader access to the papers and even to expand the projects beyond typed papers to include multimedia materials and elaborate websites. However, the websites generated have usually enjoyed very little traffic or attention beyond the small group of students and their contacts. While these websites provide original artifacts, their availability, retrievability, and accuracy are often lacking. The course or student website may go down, it may be hard to find, and factual and grammatical errors may go undetected and uncorrected. Many of these sites have remained behind password protection and consequently, have not available to the public. Other sites have been publically accessible, but are poorly linked and therefore rarely indexed with any prominence in common search engines. Even when projects have some visibility, they are rarely, if ever updated. Seldom do readers contact the authors with corrections or additions. To correct these problems, we explored the idea of having students write articles for the highly edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Student Collaborative Projects

For years, many instructors of undergraduate courses across the disciplines have struggled with how to structure group projects (Guzdial, Rick, & Kehoe, 2001; Norman, 2001; Roshelle, 1992). These educators have looked for answers to questions such as (1) ÒWhat types of projects should be given?Ó (2) ÒHow should students be assigned to teams?Ó (3) ÒHow can the teams to be monitored?Ó (4) ÒHow should the group products and the individual efforts to be evaluated?Ó This paper explores ways in which computer technology can assist in this endeavor. Specifically, we explored the use of Wikipedia.

Groupware

In the past years, there has been rapid development of a new type of software for Computer Supported Collaboration Work (CSCW) (Baeker, 1993; Grudin, 1994; Wilson, 1991). Groupware was originally designed to facilitate collaborative efforts in business and industry, but it has clear applications in science and education. Existing groupware technologies can be classified into one of three types of tools. First, electronic communication tools include email, instant messaging, file sharing, and Web publishing. Electronic conferencing tools include Internet forums, video-conferencing, and electronic meeting systems. Lastly, collaborative management tools include electronic calendars, project management software, and knowledge management software. The availability of these tools has led instructors to ask how they can use the same or similar technologies to manage and enhance collaboration in the classroom and beyond. In an attempt to answer this question, we examined the use of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as the method and the medium for electronic collaboration. Wikis have proven to be an easy to use, versatile tool for collaboration (Bold, 2006).

Wikipedia

This article addresses the use of WikipediaÕs collaborative web pages as the medium for collaborative learning projects. Wikipedia, self-described as Òthe free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,Ó is based on wiki technology designed by Ward Cunningham in 1995 (Cunningham & Leuf, 2001). Wikipedia was started in 2001 and its English language version contained 2,560,070 articles as of September 20, 2008 (Wikipedia, 2008). As of that date, Wikipedia was the 8th most visited site on the Internet (Alexa.com, 2008). Even without a registered account, anyone can create new articles or make changes to existing ones. User generated content, which includes text, images, and sound, is created in Web browsers, assisted by WikipediaÕs simple mark-up tags. Once submitted to a Wikipedia server, changes are made in real-time. Previous versions of Wikipedia articles are stored in the articleÕs history, allowing for easy restoration of removed content or deletion of added content. This open environment facilitates the creation of collaborative end products, the articles themselves. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 show screenshots of the article page, history page, edit page, and discussion page for four of the articles created in this project.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Insert Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 about here.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

 

The Study

University students in the present study were required to author Wikipedia articles as a part of the course requirements so that they would have a worldwide audience for their academic products. This was a departure from previous semesters when written term papers were required and subsequently filed away in their instructorsÕ cabinets upon completion and grading. The students participating in this project were aware that the readership of their articles would go well beyond their instructor and their classmates. We hoped this would serve as a motivating factor, as has been seen previously with Web sites (Blumenfeld et al., 1991) and Wikis (Forte & Bruckman, 2006) and result not only in high quality products but more importantly a greater sense of accomplishment and enduring pride in the work.

Method

Participants

Participants included 51 students enrolled in two sections of an upper-level undergraduate course (20 males and 31 females) and 4 students in a graduate seminar (2 males and 2 females). Both of these were psychology courses were taught at the University of Maryland, College Park during the spring 2006 and fall 2007 semesters. The undergraduate course was titled ÒThinking and Problem SolvingÓ and the graduate course was a seminar on the ÒPsychology of Human/Computer Interaction.Ó

Situation

The undergraduate course was taught in an electronic classroom that provided a desktop computer and Internet access to each student. These classrooms called ÒTeaching TheatersÓ have been the subject of considerable interest and study in the past (Norman, 1990; Shneiderman et al, 1995). The classes utilized a course management system, HyperCourseware, as part of the electronic classroom (Norman, 1994). For the graduate seminar, all of the students had notebook computers connected to the Internet via a campus wireless network.

Article Creation

Early in the semester a short edit assignment in Wikipedia was given. Students were to find an existing article that interested them and contribute some change or addition to it. Halfway through the semester, the undergraduate students chose topics in cognitive psychology for new articles and began constructing and writing the articles. The undergraduates collaborated in teams of 4 to 6 students to produce 5 articles in the spring 2006 section and 6 articles in the fall 2007 section. The undergraduate groups used collaborative project spaces in HyperCourseware to exchange ideas and information about the articles. Students were encouraged to assume roles of commentator (writer and editor), constructor (organizer and assembler), collector (researcher and assimilator), and curator (team leader) in order to subdivide the task into manageable parts. Each graduate student individually wrote one article, except for one student who wrote two articles due to the short length of her initial article for a seminar total of 5 articles.

Data Source and Content Analysis

The number of Wikipedia edits made during the semester was automatically tracked by the Wikipedia User contributions pages associated with the studentsÕ usernames and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The typology of these edits was not examined during article construction, but changes to the articles (number and type of edits) contributed by all Wikipedia editors after conclusion of the semesters were examined to see how the completed articles later evolved. To accomplish this, the History sections of the article pages, up to November 15, 2008, were analyzed.

To categorize all post-semester edits, a content analysis was performed. In their analysis of edits made to specific Wikipedia articles, Pfeil, Zaphiris, & Ang (2006) reported that they Òprocessed the pages and extracted possible categories as they emerged. By doing this several times in an iterative cycle, the categories were refined according to the data until saturation was reached.Ó This method was employed in the present study and 5 distinct categories were identified. These categories are (1) copyediting, (2) fact checking, (3) addition or removal of content, (4) automated bots, and (5) vandalizing and reverting (damage and repair). The categories are further described in Table 1. To categorize more than one change occurring in a single edit, a hierarchy was established to define the primary edit type. All changes by software bots, no matter what the type, were categorized as edits by bots. This hierarchy was followed in order by addition or removal of content, fact checking, and copyediting.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Insert Table 1 about here

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Questionnaire

The student participants were polled 5 months after the end of the semester using an online survey. The questionnaire asked for feedback about the project and assessed student post-semester contributions to the class articles and to Wikipedia in general. At the end of the questionnaire, students had the opportunity to provide open-ended comments.

 

Results

Products

A total 16 articles were created and written for Wikipedia and are listed in Table 2. The articles quickly became assessable and prominent on the Internet.      The articles have appeared as high-ranking search results from the search engine Google, when searches were performed using the article titles as the search terms. On September 20, 2008, all but one of the articles ranked number one. In addition, Web pages outside of Wikipedia were found to link to 8 out of the 16 articles.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Insert Table 2 about here

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mirror sites expand the reach of Wikipedia content. A mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site. The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) removes restrictions on distributing copies of Wikipedia content. Several for-profit websites make use of the freely available content. Consequently, the class articles reach was greater than just on Wikipedia. As a result, the class articles have appeared on the commercial websites Answers.com and AllExperts.com, among others. While the articles hosted on the Wikipedia servers are constantly evolving through the process of editing, the mirror sites generally contain only a single historical version.

Wikipedia Edits

During the semester.

During the Spring 2006 semester, at least 20 of the 26 students directly made edits to Wikipedia. Although not a project requirement for this semester, 14 of the students registered unique usernames for Wikipedia accounts, including all 4 graduate students. One undergraduate group of 5 students utilized a shared username. As evidenced by their static IP addresses, 5 undergraduate students contributed edits anonymously. The number of edits per student ranged from a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 54 (M = 20.16, SD = 14.88). The number of distinct pages edited by these students ranged from 1 to 13 (M = 4.05, SD = 3.81). One undergraduate student (the second author of this paper) was removed from the data as an outlier; this student contributed heavily as a regular editor of Wikipedia, with >2000 edits and >1000 pages edited.

For the Fall 2007 semester, all 32 students were required to register and report unique Wikipedia usernames. The number of edits per student ranged from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 39 (M = 10.75, SD = 9.89). The number of distinct pages edited by these students ranged from 1 to 5 (M = 2.09, SD = 1.03).

After semester completion.

Edits performed to the class articles, after completion of the semesters up to November 15, 2008, were tabulated. These edits were categorized from a total count of 490 (394 constructive). The category of vandalizing and reverting was not included in the number of constructive edits. Constructive edits per article ranged from a minimum of 4 to a maximum of 69 (M = 24.63, SD = 16.33), as listed in Table 3. The largest amount of edits was in the category of copyediting, followed in order by vandalizing/reverting, addition or removal of content, bots, and fact checking. The total number of edits for all 16 articles in the category of addition or removal of content was 59. This number indicates that the content produced by the students during the semester remained largely intact. By examining the contributions made to Wikipedia by the 46 available student usernames, the indication is that student post-semester editing to the articles and to Wikipedia as a whole was minimal to non-existent.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Insert Table 3 about here

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Article Change

Because of the nature of this project, it was hypothesized that the class articles would receive less post-completion editing than Wikipedia articles in general. The thinking behind this was that since a professor had supervised the students in article creation and writing, editors would be less likely to make changes to these articles as than articles generated by unsupervised public contributors to Wikipedia. To examine this possibility, the numbers of edits to the 16 class articles were compared to 160 other Wikipedia articles. These 160 Wikipedia articles were chosen at random from the same Wikipedia categories as the class articles (10 per category), were of similar length, and created before January 01, 2008. To normalize all 176 articles for age, the numbers of edits made to articles for the period January 1, 2008 to September 20, 2008 were tabulated. Statistics such as edits per month are affected by article age. The 16 class articles had from zero to 34 edits (M = 10.25, SD = 10.41), while the 160 articles had from zero to 266 edits (M = 26.28, SD = 38.56). While there was great variability in the number of edits for both groups, the Wikipedia articles as a whole received significantly more edits than the class articles (t(192) = 2.25, p < .05).

Questionnaire

There were 41 respondents to the online survey. All 4 graduate students and 37 of the 51 undergraduates participated. The sample represented authors of all 16 articles. Since completion of the semester, 66% of the students reported viewing their own article. Of the students who viewed their own articles, 18% reported making edits to them. When asked if they viewed any articles created by other class members, 20% responded affirmatively and 12% of this number reported making edits to these articles. The survey results were consistent with the small number of post-semester Wikipedia edits as evidenced by the contributions of the student usernames.

Questions also examined the studentsÕ post-semester usage of information resources. The use of Wikipedia as an information source was reported by 100% of the spring 2006 respondents. The usage of the Web, as a whole, for accessing information was reported as ÒhighÓ by 80% and as ÒmoderateÓ by the other 20%. When asked if they planned to continue (or start) using Wikipedia as a reference source for current or future courses, 73% responded Òdefinitely yesÓ or Òcautiously yes,Ó 15% responded Òmaybe,Ó and 12% responded Òprobably notÓ or Òdefinitely not.Ó The statement that Wikipedia contains reliable and accurate information was supported by 88% of the respondents. Finally, 93% of the respondents reported being aware of Wikipedia before enrolling in their course.

The majority (57%) of students wrote open-ended comments. One student wrote, ÒI loved this project, I think it's a really great way of spreading knowledge. This is the only class I've taken where I actually felt like my paper was going to do more than sit on a desk. I wish more professors would pick up an idea like this.Ó Another student wrote, ÒI really liked the idea of sharing our knowledge with others, so that it wasn't a wasted effort of writing a term paper that no one else but the grader is going to see.Ó Yet another wrote, ÒI learned to view [W]ikipedia in a whole new way after creating my own page.Ó

Discussion

Consistent with the ideas behind Web 2.0, the students became publishers of Internet content. There was a social incentive as well as an academic requirement for students to work on team projects. No longer did just the instructor view their assignments, but so did the entire class and potentially anyone else with access to the Internet. As one student commented,

I think that writing an article as a project was a great idea. Just now as I did this survey I Googled "tip of the tongue." It was number 5 on GoogleÉNumber 5 out of 3 million is undeniably cool, that alone is satisfying enough that I'd do it all over again.

This prominence can act as an incentive for students in the production of their assignments utilizing Wikipedia and other high-profile Internet sites.

Wikis provide a user-friendly platform for the dissemination of course projects. There was no need, as in some previous semesters, to take time out from the course material to teach HTML. This interface was accessible even to students with limited computer experience. Wikipedia is also freely available on the Internet. There is no need to purchase or license software. Students can access it from any computer or device with an Internet connection.

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia to which the student can add content and editorially revise. As a global encyclopedia, Wikipedia covers even the most obscure subject matter. With WikipediaÕs breadth, also comes its visibility. Wikipedia articles are the top search results on the major search engines. The studentÕs work continues to exist as a high-profile editable web page. The students can have satisfaction that they contributed some knowledge to a collaborative encyclopedia that has global reach. They can view that contribution at any time of the day and from any computer or device with Internet access. They can promote their work to others by emailing links of the article pages. The students can view if their contributions are updated, changed, or corrected.

Wikipedia allowed for the automatic tracking of student contributions, but a limitation in this study was that since user accounts were not required, not all of the student edits were able to be tracked. Future projects should require all students to register unique Wikipedia usernames so that their edits may be monitored by the instructor. Student projects in Wikipedia are wholly verifiable, as all edits remain in the History of the article. Unique usernames also allow for greater use of more advanced and freely available third-party tracking tools. In addition, all students should be required to share equally in contributing parts of and edits to the articles. The History of the articles would reveal if this were the case. This tracking would be impossible with group projects written on hard copy or given orally. Floaters, those who do not contribute to the group, are more immediately identifiable in Wikipedia group projects. However, in the current study as noted earlier, students were encouraged to assume team roles of collector, commentator, constructor, and curator. This may have led to an uneven number of edits across the team members. Constructors probably assumed more of a role of uploading the article, and commentators spending more time writing and editing. Collectors and curators were probably underrepresented in the number of edits. In the future, this disparity could be reduced by requiring students to use the discussion area of the article to post contributions and to discuss the construction and organization of the article.

Veteran editors of Wikipedia suggested that the incremental generation of the article over the course of the semester poses a problem. Incomplete articles are frequently tagged for deletion. For the most part in this project, we avoided this by added in a note in the discussion area of each article that this was a course project that would be complete by the end of the semester. Nevertheless, it was suggested that the teams use some other area for intermediate creation of articles, such as Wikipedia User or User talk pages.

 

            Scalability is an issue of for conducting a similar project with larger class sizes. While there is a never-ending source of material for current event and popular culture articles on Wikipedia, there will be fewer academic topics available for article creation as the encyclopedia continues to grow. Future group projects utilizing Wikipedia would less likely involve the creation of articles but instead involve expansion and revision of existing articles. The flexibility between new article creation and article rewrites makes Wikipedia a useful tool across academic disciplines and assignment goals. A course assignment can focus on as simple as one edit made to an existing article of the studentÕs choice, related to course content to an extensive reworking and development of the article. For these assignments, the students should explain why they chose their particular articles and their assessments of them. The students then describe the additions or changes to the articles and the reasons why they made them.

Finally, with the exception of a small number of edits made by subsequent Wikipedia editors, the studentsÕ articles in this study have so far had a continual and an extremely prominent existence. We see the challenge being how to motivate students to become contributors to collaborative knowledge outside of the classroom. Can we motivate students to become Wikipedia editors during their free time? This question is broader when looking at outlets beyond Wikipedia. The Internet provides a changing base of opportunities for creativity, for hosting the products of creativity, and for creative collaboration.

 

References

Alexa.com Internet traffic rankings. (2008). Traffic report for http://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved September 20, 2008, from http://www.alexa.com.

Baeker, R. (1993). Readings in groupware and computer-supported cooperative work: Assisting human-human collaboration, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman Publishers.

Blumenfeld, P. C., Soloway, E., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Guzdial, M., & Palincsar, A.

(1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the

learning. Educational Psychologist, 26 (3/4), 369-398.

Bold, M. (2006). Use of wikis in graduate course work. Journal of Interactive Learning

Research, 17 (1), 5-14.

Cunningham, W., & Leuf, B. (2001). The Wiki Way—Quick Collaboration on the Web. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Forte, A., & Bruckman, A. (2006). From Wikipedia to the classroom: Exploring online publication and learning. Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Learning Sciences, Bloomington, Indiana, 182-188.

Grudin, J. (1994). Computer-supported cooperative work: Its history and participation. IEEE Computer, 27(5), 19-26.

Guzdial, M., Rick, J., & Kehoe, C. (2001). Beyond adoption to invention: Teacher-created collaborative activities in higher education. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 265-279.

Norman, K. L. (1990). The electronic teaching theater: Interactive hypermedia and mental models of the classroom. Current Psychology Research and Reviews (Special Issue: Hypermedia and artificial intelligence). 9, 141-161.

Norman, K. L. (1994). HyperCourseware for interactive instruction in the electronic classroom. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 26, 255-259.

Norman, K. L. (1994). Navigating the educational space with HyperCourseware. Hypermedia, 6, 35-60.

Norman, K. L. (2001). Collaborative interactions in support of learning. In R. R. Hazemi & S, Hailes (Ed.) The Digital University: Building Learning Communities.

Pfeil, U., Zaphiris, P., & Ang, C. S., (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (1), article 5. Retrieved April 11, 2007 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/pfeil.html

Roschelle, J. (1992). Learnning by collaborating: Convergent conceuptual change. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2, 235-276.

Shneiderman, B., Alavi, M., Norman, K., & Borkowski, E. (1995). Windows of opportunities in electronic classrooms, Communications of the ACM, 38, 19-24.

Wikipedia (2008). Main page. Retrieved September 20, 2008 from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wilson, P. (1991). Computer supported cooperative work: An introduction. Oxford, England: Norwell, MA: Intellect.

 

Table 1

Classification of Each Edit Type Performed to the Class Articles after Semester Conclusion

Name of category

Explanation

Copyediting

Corrections: grammar, spelling, capitalization; Wikipedia style; rearrangement of text; Wikipedia tagging

Fact checking

Names; dates

Addition or removal of content

Addition or deletion of text, images, or external Internet links

Bots

Automated software edits

Vandalizing and reverting

Vandalism; link spam; reverts (restoration of previous versions)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2

Student Produced Wikipedia Articles for Spring 2006 and Fall 2007 Semesters

Students

Article

URL

Undergraduate

Spring 2006

Functional fixedness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness

Interface metaphor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_metaphor

Mental chronometry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_chronometry

PlatoÕs problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_Problem

Tip of the tongue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue

Undergraduate

Fall 2007

Concept learning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning

Distributed cognition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_cognition

Einstellung effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect

Familiarity heuristic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familiarity_heuristic

Logogen model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogen_model

Semantic memory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_memory

Graduate

Spring 2006

 

Construction field computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_field_computing

Cosmobot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmobot

Interface apparency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_apparency

Spatial visualization ability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability

Universal usability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_usability

 

 

 

 

                                               

Table 3

Changes to Articles by Category after Semester Completion (as of November 15, 2008)

Article

Total edits

Copyediting

Fact checking

Addition or removal of content

Bots

Vandalizing and reverting

Functional fixedness

 

37

24

6

2

3

2

Interface metaphor

 

43

27

2

5

6

3

Mental chronometry

 

42

20

3

11

2

6

PlatoÕs problem

 

30

16

 

1

3

10

Tip of the tongue

 

87

48

1

15

5

18

Construction field computing

 

23

8

 

3

5

12

Cosmobot

 

17

8

 

3

6

 

Interface apparency

 

17

12

 

 

5

 

Spatial visualization ability

 

47

18

 

1

7

21

Universal usability

 

17

9

2

3

 

3

Concept learning

23

16

3

2

2

 

Distributed cognition

31

16

 

9

3

3

Einstellung effect

4

3

 

 

1

 

Familiarity heuristic

7

4

 

 

1

2

Logogen model

9

5

 

 

3

1

Semantic memory

51

30

2

4

 

15

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. Screen shot of the article ÒEinstellung Effect.Ó

Figure 2. Screen shot of the discussion page for the article ÒFunctional Fixedness.Ó

Figure 3. Screen shot of the edit page for the article ÒTip of the Tongue.Ó

Figure 4. Screen shot of the history page for the article ÒConcept Learning.Ó