The Management and Creation of Knowledge: Do Wikis Help?

Wikis are frequently cited in Higher Education research as appropriate and powerful web spaces which provide opportunities to capture, discuss, and review individual, group, project or organisational activities. These activities, in turn, offer possibilities for knowledge development by utilising wiki collaborative active spaces. The chapter uses selected case studies examples to illustrate the use of wikis to support online community based tasks, project development/process, collaborative materials development and various student and peer supported activities. A key focus of the chapter centres on evaluating the effectiveness (or otherwise) of wikis to create online communities to support knowledge management (development, retention and transfer). See Choy & Ng (2007), Lamb (2004), Elgort (2008), Raman et al. (2005). By way of contextualising the studies, a variety of uses of wikis in higher education are reviewed as part of this chapter. See, for example, Lamb, (2004) Choy, & Ng, (2007), Doolan, (2006) Jones P. (2007) Raman, et al. (2005) Grierson, et al.,, (2004). Creation of knowledge sentence + refs? The chapter concludes with a review of the emergent themes arising and lessons learned from the case studies. This leads into a series of recommendations relating to the effective establishment, design, management and support and use of wikis to support knowledge creation and collaborative enterprise

Use of wikis as a collaborative ICT tool for extending the frontiers of knowledge in tertiary institutions

The human brain works much like a network of computers connected by nodes. These nodes allow computers on the same network to communicate effectively. Educators have discovered that today’s learning environment functions much the same way, with learners connecting to the internet, to other learners and to their teachers to increase their knowledge. This discovery has led to a paradigm shift in education which has transformed the learning environment from teacher-centered to learner-centered. The learner-centered environment allows for interactivity, communication and collaboration. When Web 2.0 technologies are used in the classroom, learners and teachers are given the opportunity to extend the frontiers of knowledge by collaborating and contributing to knowledge. This paper explores the possibility of using Wikis – a Web 2.0 technology – to extend the frontiers of knowledge. It also discusses how Wikis are presently being used in education; how to create a Wiki site using three different Wiki host platforms; and how to contribute content to Wikipedia – which is the world’s largest Wiki site. Finally, recommendations are given on what management of institutions can do to encourage the use of Wikis in the classroom.KEYWORDS: Collaboration, Web 2.0 technology, Wikis, Wikipedia, 21st century skills, Frontiers of knowledg

Using wikis to help first year students develop collaborative knowledge management skills for tomorrow

In the information economy the ability to harness digital technologies to capture and manage knowledge is a critical skill for university graduates. This study examines the use of wikis as an assessment tool to help first year students develop a range of knowledge management skills, including creative collaboration, consensus building and technical literacy. The purpose of the study is to provide an exploratory analysis of student attitudes toward the use of wikis as a collaborative assessment task. The results indicate that most students perceived wikis to be a flexible, convenient and fair pedagogical technique for collaborative learning. While many students preferred the wiki to a paper-based assessment, some students were not convinced that the task produced better collaborative outcomes. It is suggested that a staged wiki assessment might overcome some of the perceived shortcomings reported by students

Democratising Organisational Knowledge: The Potential of the Corporate Wiki

Attempts to impose knowledge management often ignore the vast organisational resource of workrelated tacit knowledge possessed by knowledge workers. Our research reveals that activities supported by social technologies such as Wikis, may provide a more appropriate capability for tacit knowledge management where a network centric focus is adopted. A corporate Wiki has the potential to engage the collective responsibilities of knowledge workers to transfer their collective experience and skills into a dynamic shared knowledge repository. However, the traditional organisational culture can be reluctant to allow this power shift which surrenders the monopolistic control of the few over the creation and management of organisational knowledge. In order to frame the theoretical perspectives of these new processes of creation, accumulation and maintenance of tacit knowledge in organisations, this paper uses Activity Theory to analyse the Wiki as a tool that mediates employee-based knowledge management activities leading to the democratisation of organisational knowledge

BIWiki - Using a Business Intelligence Wiki to Form a Virtual Community of Practice for Portuguese Master's Students

Web 2.0 software in general and wikis in particular have been receiving growing attention as they constitute new and powerful tools, capable of supporting information sharing, creation of knowledge and a wide range of collaborative processes and learning activities. This paper introduces briefly some of the new opportunities made possible by Web 2.0 or the social Internet, focusing on those offered by the use of wikis as learning spaces. A wiki allows documents to be created, edited and shared on a group basis; it has a very easy and efficient markup language, using a simple Web browser. One of the most important characteristics of wiki technology is the ease with which pages are created and edited. The facility for wiki content to be edited by its users means that its pages and structure form a dynamic entity, in permanent evolution, where users can insert new ideas, supplement previously existing information and correct errors and typos in a document at any time, up to the agreed final version. This paper explores wikis as a collaborative learning and knowledge-building space and its potential for supporting Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). In the academic years (2007/8 and 2008/9), students of the Business Intelligence module at the Master's programme of studies on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence at Instituto Superior de Estatistica e Gestao de Informacao of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, have been actively involved in the creation of BIWiki - a wiki for Business Intelligence in the Portuguese language. Based on usage patterns and feedback from students participating in this experience, some conclusions are drawn regarding the potential of this technology to support the emergence of VCoPs; some provisional suggestions will be made regarding the use of wikis to support information sharing, knowledge creation and transfer and collaborative learning in Higher Education

Collaborating with Wikis

{Excerpt} As the internet revolution presses on, computer-mediated communications through social (conversational) technologies also seem to advance every day. (Social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, commercial sites such as Amazon.com and eBay, and media sites such as Flickr and YouTube, to name a few applications, have become verypopular.) Given the fast-rising number of these technologies ,the confused might recall that people form online communities by combining one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication modes. The commonality is that all tap the power of new information and communication technologies and the resultant interconnectivity to facilitate engagement, collaboration, and sharing of tacit knowledge. Wikis are one such form of social technology, designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content using a simplified markup language. They are used to create and power collaborative websites. Some believe that such open, peering, sharing, and global tools ring the death knell of old-school, inwardly focused, self-contained corporations

BIWiki - Using a Business Intelligence Wiki to Form a Virtual Community of Practice for Portuguese Master's Students

Web 2.0 software in general and wikis in particular have been receiving growing attention as they constitute new and powerful tools, capable of supporting information sharing, creation of knowledge and a wide range of collaborative processes and learning activities. This paper introduces briefly some of the new opportunities made possible by Web 2.0 or the social Internet, focusing on those offered by the use of wikis as learning spaces. A wiki allows documents to be created, edited and shared on a group basis; it has a very easy and efficient markup language, using a simple Web browser. One of the most important characteristics of wiki technology is the ease with which pages are created and edited. The facility for wiki content to be edited by its users means that its pages and structure form a dynamic entity, in permanent evolution, where users can insert new ideas, supplement previously existing information and correct errors and typos in a document at any time, up to the agreed final version. This paper explores wikis as a collaborative learning and knowledge-building space and its potential for supporting Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). In the academic years (2007/8 and 2008/9), students of the Business Intelligence module at the Master's programme of studies on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence at Instituto Superior de Estatistica e Gestao de Informacao of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, have been actively involved in the creation of BIWiki - a wiki for Business Intelligence in the Portuguese language. Based on usage patterns and feedback from students participating in this experience, some conclusions are drawn regarding the potential of this technology to support the emergence of VCoPs; some provisional suggestions will be made regarding the use of wikis to support information sharing, knowledge creation and transfer and collaborative learning in Higher Education

Student Wiki Pages: Online collaboration in a networked environment

This chapter is concerned with student collaboration and ‘peer-support’ pedagogy as facilitated by online learning environments. Specifically the chapter discusses the use of wiki tools as part of the e-learning strategy in a first year BA (Hons) Communication and Media unit at Bournemouth University. The pedagogical aim here is to assess students’ ability to work effectively in a computer-mediated environment by applying interpersonal communication skills taught in the unit, whilst fostering a professional engagement with the unit’s theoretical foundation and facilitating student-centred learning. The Student Wiki Pages is an educational strategy that encourages students to develop active learning, media literacy and scholarship at the start of their degree programmes, providing a solid underpinning for their future studies. Collaboratively producing a wiki means students have to be self-reflexive and critically evaluate their own notes from lectures and set readings on a weekly basis. Drawing on evidence from 2010/2011, the chapter will demonstrate how the Student Wiki Pages helped inspire students’ commitment to learning by analysing five core areas where student performance improved. Practical complexities of assessing collaborative learning will be evaluated, together with a discussion on how to manage student expectations in relation to grading and feedback

The use of Wikis in Education - a review of the literature

This paper reviews the literature surrounding the use of Web 2.0 in education. It examines various perspectives of what Web 2.0 means, and how Web 2.0 can support a constructivist pedagogy. Case studies involving Wikis are examined and the problems experienced are considered from both a technological and a group-working perspective. The paper concludes that although Wikis have the potential to support social-constructivism the differences between artificially constructed learning groups (formal learning) and self-forming and emergent social groups (informal learning) result in a requirement for greater attention to the theories on group working when creating group tasks using Wikis for learning purposes. Wikis are a tool and do not, by themselves, result in satisfactory collaborationPeer reviewe