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Revision as of 21:57, 16 January 2008

Discussion points

I'm finding it hard to break things up my ideas into all the subheadings. For example, in talking about one of my class wiki assignments, elements of collaborative writing, community building, peer-to-peer interaction, ... all come up. I think it makes the most sense to tell the whole story at one time.

We can expand on the background/literature review in the final version of the paper.

Introduction

A wiki (derived from the Hawaiian word for quick) is a type of website that provides a framework for users to interactively and collaboratively build a database of interrelated information quickly and easily. Wikipedia (ref http://www.wikipedia.org), currently featuring more that two million articles in English alone, is the most well known wiki, but wikis can also be targeted to smaller audiences, such as an engineering class. Lamb (ref) discusses the use of wikis in an academic environment. He provides an overview of the wiki concept, addresses common concerns about wikis (e.g., "If anyone can edit my text, then anybody can ruin my text", copyright issues), and presents some of the associated pedagogical challenges. Others (refs) have addressed similar issues.

Our objective in this paper is to describe our specific experiences with wikis and teaching mechanical engineering classes, both positive and negative. We will discuss our use of wikis in teaching a capstone senior design course and graduate courses in design optimization and small scale heat transfer. In all three courses, a wiki provides (i) logistical benefits to the instructor compared to a traditional web page, and (ii) an interactive and collaborative online-environment in which students can drive their own learning experience. In all three courses, the wiki is designed to grow in subsequent offerings, providing a basis and standard for future students. In addition to discussing the benefits of course wikis to both instructors and students, we will also describe the process of setting up and maintaining a wiki on a web server.

Wiki software

Most wiki software is open source code, and numerous wiki engines are freely available. The most popular one is MediaWiki, the same engine used for Wikipedia. MediaWiki is written in the hypertext scripting language PHP, incorporating a database management system. We choose and also recommend using MediaWiki to setup a classroom wiki for several reasons:

1. It has large-scale database capabilities and high operational reliability;
2. the installation and maintenance processes are simple and friendly;
3. MediaWiki has its own wiki, offering users comprehensive instructions about installation, maintenance, and updating; and
4. MediaWiki offers an integrated math-formula display function similar to the LaTeX math syntax. This important feature, especially for scientific and engineering courses, provides a convenient protocol to display mathematical symbols and formulations on a wiki page.

Linux is recommended for the operating system platform of a wiki because it is open source and has strong security features. Prior to installing the main wiki program, the PHP interpreter, HTTP server (e.g. Apache web server), and database server (e.g. MySQL) should be installed. Detailed installation procedures can be found in the corresponding websites.

A well-designed wiki program should be easy to maintain by the administrator. From our experiences, the maintenance responsibilities for a class wiki include:

1. user account management,
2. wiki page management,
3. database and file backups,
4. system updating, and
5. security issue handing.

MediaWiki provides a well-designed web interface for wiki administration. Backups and updates can be performed by following the procedures from the MediaWiki website. Security issues require an additional tool. A plug-in program called reCAPTCHA, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, is recommended. reCAPTCHA can effectively block malicious automatic registrations and spam by requiring users to read and interpret short distorted text graphics that are difficult for computer programs to read automatically prior to making changes that contain external links.

Editing a wiki page is simple and straightforward. The majority of graduate and undergraduate students in our experience have worked with wikis outside of class, and they are able to begin editing immediately without special instruction. "Advanced" topics such as formatting of tables or writing equations generally require a reference, but using MediaWiki means that all of these items are identical to Wikipedia, and therefore Wikipedia pages can be referenced for advanced information. Furthermore, Wikipedia text falls under the GNU Free Documentation License; therefore, any Wikipedia page can be copied into a new wiki, so long as the Wikipedia source is identified.

In addition, each user is able to select her own settings to define how she would like to view wiki content. For example, headings can be numbered in outline format (section 1.1, etc.) or can be shown without numbers; a table of contents can be automatically added for pages with several headings; and each user can select which aesthetic "skin" to use.

Professor Michalek's Design Decisions Wiki (DDWiki) is located at http://ddl.me.cmu.edu/ddwiki/. Professor McGaughey's Nanoscale Transport Phenomena Wiki (NTPWiki) is located at http://ntpl.me.cmu.edu/ntplwiki/.

Course management

Information dissemination

For the course instructor, the wiki provides a web environment in which to disseminate information about the class. Like a regular website, the course schedule, homework assignments, and important documents can be made available. The wiki interface provides a convenient way to update and modify information, as the editing can be done directly online with no need for external software. The wiki can be updated from any computer with internet access and has many convenient built-in features (e.g., tables). The "preview" feature allows the page editor to see their changes before appearing formally on the wiki, allowing for easy format modifications. From the student perspective, information dissemination from the instructor through the wiki is the same as it would be on a regular web page. Students may also subscribe to receive email alerts and/or RSS feeds to monitor updates and changes to course material.

Comment about security - can the list of people who can edit a particular page be controlled?

Course notes

Course notes, particularly if they are prepared using LaTeX, can readily be placed on the wiki. These pages can then be made open to students, where they can make changes and initiate discussion of points that are not clear to them. (There's a CMU CS prof who does this - I think I have a newspaper article about it). In this way, the instructor can get immediate feedback from students after they have had time to digest material (such interaction during class is not always effective), helping them to plan out future lectures. Students will also be able to catch small errors (spelling, symbols, math). The notes will be in a dynamic state throughout the semester.

Reward students for their work on the wiki?

Monitoring student progress

Instructors can monitor student progress in real time, foresee potential problems in time to offer corrections, and have access to a full history of team member contributions to support individualized feedback and grading of team projects.

Student interaction

The active experience that a wiki offers students is its strongest feature. We will illustrate this feature through discussion of three courses in which we have used wikis

Collaborative writing in Small-Scale Heat Transfer

McGaughey's SSHT class had ten graduate students. In the first lecture they were broken into three groups and asked to write down what they knew about conduction, convection, or radiation on the board. After 5 minutes, the groups rotated and were asked to edit what another group had written. We then had a class discussion on how what they had done was like how a wiki page operates.

The first wiki assignment, presented on the wiki, was as follows:

Task 1: First Page Due: March 27, 2007, Value: 10 points

In the first class we discussed the concepts of

1. Conduction
2. Convection
3. Radiation
4. Solid
5. Liquid
6. Gas
7. Vapor
8. Phonon
9. Photon
10. Fluid Particle

McGaughey: Electron

There are ten terms and ten students in the class. You have a number assigned to you in class. You are responsible for making a wiki page on that topic by the due date (start by clicking on the link above). Add your name to the number above, as I have done for electron. Include introductory information using what we discussed in class, things you learned in other classes, reference books, the internet, etc. Be sure to reference all your sources. The content should be appropriate for an undergraduate mechanical engineering student with some exposure to heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. Try to include a few equations, some figures, etc. and make links to the other NTPwiki pages. Your grade will be based on both the content and visual appearance of the wiki page.

Using the history feature on the wiki, it is possible to track the creation of each page. In initially constructing their pages, students made between two and 22 modifications (note that a change is noted every time you save the page, if it is every minute or every hour). McGaughey then read all the pages and left comments for improvements. The students returned to their page and addressed these points.

The second wiki assignment was as follows:

Task 2: Page Editing Due: April 5, 2007, Value: 10 points

Revise/modify/add to the wiki page corresponding to the second number given to you in class. Include some more advanced information. Make links around words/terms that you feel deserve their own page. Add figures. You should consult with the original author. The final grade for each wiki page will given to both people who worked on it. Also feel free to look at the other pages and offer suggestions on what should be included. McGaughey has already done this, and left comments on the pages.

All students edited a second page. The majority of students, even though it was not required, worked on their original page after it had been edited. A number of students edited pages that they were not assigned to. McGaughey was very pleased with how these two exercises turned out. The quality of the wiki pages was very good, and clearly a result of the collaborative writing aspect of their development. There was a also a clear sense of an evolving class identity. The collaborative aspect of the second wiki assignment brought students together both online and isn the classroom. The students were often discussing their pages before and after class.

Students had a third wiki assignment where they were allowed to choose the topic for a new wiki page. They were encourage to make links with all the other pages.

This collaborative activity developed community within the class, and provided a series of wiki pages that can be used in subsequent teachings of the course at a level suitable to the students.

 ? in Senior Design

In the capstone senior design course students used the wiki in teams to collaboratively write design project reports, including pictures and videos to document use and functionality.

Students can be asked to post comments critiquing the work of other teams and can observe the work of other teams to benchmark and build ideas.

 ? in Optimization

In the graduate course on optimization and product development, students engaged in independent research on a topic related to the course but beyond what was covered in class, writing a wiki page as a report on the topic and presenting it to the class.

Previous subject headings - terms that we should try to use in discussing our courses

Peer-to-peer interaction

Student-instructor interaction

Contribution history

Community-building

Information growth, consolidation and sharing

Summary and conclusions

Before being converted to its current format, this paper was initially written on Michalek's wiki.

Use of wikis beyond the classroom. e.g., creating an online research community, information warehouse for a research group (methods, practices)

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ching-Shin (Norman) Shiau and John Thomas for their work in setting up our wiki servers.

References

• Park, K.R., and Chao, J.T., (2007) "Wiki as a Teaching Tool," Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3, 57-72. [1]
• Elgort, I., (2007) "Using wikis as a learning tool in higher education," Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007. [2]