Designing Knowledge Management Systems for Teaching and Learning with Wiki Technology

ABSTRACT

A wiki is a group collaboration software tool based on Web server technology. This paper examines the use of a wiki to facilitate knowledge management in an academic setting. We present a case study about how a wiki was used to support collaborative activities in a knowledge management class at a graduate-level information systems and technology school. Our findings suggest that wikis can support collaborative knowledge creation and sharing in an academic environment. Success in attempts to provide such support may depend on: familiarity with wiki technology, careful planning for implementation and use, appropriate class size, and motivation of students to engage in discovery learning.

Keywords: Wiki technology, Knowledge Management, Teaching and Learning, Systems Design

1. MOTIVATION

The majority of literature pertaining to implementation of knowledge management systems emphasizes the corporate world (see Von Krogh 1998; Hackbarth 1998; Davenport and Prusak 1998; Alavi and Leidner 2001). If one is interested in educational settings, one is left with some important questions: How relevant arc knowledge management systems to education? Can knowledge management systems be designed to support teaching and learning objectives? What should a knowledge management system for teaching and learning include? What do emerging social software technologies, such as wikis, have to offer in the design of knowledge management systems for teaching and learning?

With or without answers to such questions, academicsteachers and researchers alike-can be expected to create software artifacts to support knowledge management for teaching and learning. This paper explores how best to create such artifacts. To that end, it reports our experiences in using a social software tool (namely, wiki technology) to support academic knowledge management. Through these experiences, we have learned what needs to be done next in order to learn more.

Our school offers a knowledge management course, which has as one of its objectives to expose students to knowledge management technology. In this course, we introduce wiki technology as a simple and inexpensive, but practical, tool that has value for knowledge management. Details about wikis and the objectives of our knowledge management course are discussed below.

The objectives of this paper are to examine: (i) what attributes a knowledge management system for teaching and learning should have, (ii) if wikis can be used to implement a knowledge management system for teaching and learning, and (iii) if wiki technology is effective in its support for knowledge creation and sharing in an academic setting. Note that the case study reported here was not conducted as a formal design science project, but as an attempt to have the students actively learn about wiki technology and how this technology might serve as a knowledge management system for teaching and learning.

The paper proceeds as follows. section two provides an overview of wiki technology. section three examines why wiki technology could be used in the design of a knowledge management system for teaching and learning, based on the Alavi and Leidner (2001) knowledge management framework. section four presents a case study, which involved the design of a wiki as an instantiation of a knowledge management system to support teaching and learning in a graduate-level knowledge management class.

2. OVERVIEW OF WIKI TECHOLOGY

'Wiki' is the Hawaiian word for 'quick'. Leuf and Cunningham (2001) define a wiki as "a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information-a database where each page is easily editable by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client" (p. 14).

Leuf and Cunningham offer several technical attributes of wiki technology:

* Wikis run over the World Wide Web and can be supported by any browser.

* The technology is governed by an underlying HTTP protocol that determines client and server communication.

* Wikis are able to respond to both requests for data (GET) and data submission (POST), in a given Web front, based on the HTTP protocol.

From a functional dimension, they discuss three major attributes of wiki technology:

* Any member of a wiki community can edit any pages in that community's wiki Web site. The editing of wiki pages does not require any additional functions in the Web browser.

* Members of a wiki community can build and develop "meaningful topic associations" (p. 16) by creating numerous links between wiki pages. The linking of wiki pages is simple to do.

* Originally the technology was not meant to engage casual visitors; rather, the technology was designed to enable users to regularly update the wiki pages in a collaborative fashion, thereby continuously changing the nature of the wiki Web site.

Wikis are increasingly being accepted as a new breed of collaborative technology. Wiki technology can impact knowledge management, and can support knowledge creation and sharing (Leuf and Cunningham 2001; Wagner 2004; Lamb 2004). The first wiki, implemented in 1995 by the Portland Pattern Repository group, permitted users to create, edit, and organize content in a Web format (Wagner 2004). Wagner describes eleven principles that govern the design of a wiki. These principles are summarized in Table 1.