Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
form spontaneously when bloggers share interests, domains knowledge, and forms
of discourse. Shared interests and knowledge attracts people to blogging com-
munities while blogs afford the development of distributed expertise by allowing
bloggers to contribute new and potentially useful facts, judgments, and comments.
Knowledge and practice are advanced during communities of practice.
Wikis
Wiki are systems (tools) that allow a number of users to construct corpuses of knowl-
edge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages
(Franklin &Harmelen, 2007). Wikis have been used for both individual and collabo-
rative purposes in education. They allow individual learners to write, edit, and revise
their own thoughts and over time to monitor, alter, and reflect on them. Wikis also
allow groups of learners to collaborate on writing, shaping, designing, and managing
wikis on diverse topics.
Wikis can promote process-oriented as opposed to a product-oriented collabo-
rative writing (Lamb, 2004) by lending to it a degree of seriousness and a sense
of permanence (Godwin-Jones, 2003) and by allowing for open access with unre-
stricted collaboration in contributing and editing tests (Hsu, 2007). Wikis also allow
for incremental knowledge creation and enhancement (Cole, 2009), do not impose
pre-defined structures unlike blogs (Bryant, 2006), and are easy to use (Ebersbach,
2008). Wikis enable users to trace the history of their collaboration (Bower, Woo,
Roberts, & Watters, 2006). Wikis allow for concrete tasks requiring the negoti-
ation of meanings where the identity of the contributors is not essential to the
task (Bower et al., 2006). Wiki users are motivated by perceived incongruities
between their own knowledge and the amount of information available on the
wiki.
Because wikis allow users to create and collaboratively revise texts, research on
wikis has focused on writing skills and collaboration. Users can create content and
then add, delete, or change any parts they want. Learners have reported that they
were able to improve their writing and critical thinking skills by working on wikis
(Wheeler, Yeomans, & Wheeler, 2008). The central group work spaces offered by
wikis have been found to facilitate group collaboration and communication (Bower
et al., 2006). Cognitive conflicts, assimilation, and accommodation have been used
to account for knowledge building in wikis (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008). In addi-
tion to eliminating inconsistencies, appropriation also reflects mutual engagement in
building knowledge. Users demonstrate higher levels of agency than bloggers since
their contributions will be demonstrated by their writings. Higher levels of collec-
tive cognition may derive from the competitive as opposed to collaborative basis
of wiki involvement. The sense of mutual engagement in wikis should be stronger
among communities of practice because in so far they emphasize mutual engage-
ment. Participants learn to expand knowledge and improve practice by interacting
and sharing community goals.
