Designing Knowledge Management Systems for Teaching and Learning with Wiki Technology

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2005 by Raman, Murali, Ryan, Terry, Olfman, Lorne

In addressing the question "which aspect of the wiki do you use the most?" two students claimed they had used the forum the most, and two students indicated they had used the FAQ the most. The most popular segments of the wiki technology were the wiki home page and the article review segment. The wiki home page generated the most use in terms of updates, posting and comments. This page received a total of 5285 hits, although only a total of 449 (8.5%) modifications were made. The second most popular feature was the article review page. This page generated a total of 2054 hits, but only 400 hits (20%) were updates or modifications to content. The top six participants in the class contributed 75% of the updates made on the home page. This is an indication that the wiki was used more to obtain information and update content than to build knowledge by virtue of collaborative effort.

Figure 1 summarizes wiki activity during the semester. The graph captures three core activities that can be performed by the wiki users: create new pages, update pages or rollback pages. Figure 1 suggests that the main activity done on the wiki was updating pages already in existence. These were summaries of journal articles developed by the previous years' students that had been uploaded to the wiki. While these updates could be considered to constitute the addition or revision of knowledge, for the most part the technology was not used to generate new knowledge.

The sudden spike in the graph occurs after the middle of the semester. This probably was due to a stern reminder by the instructor that a portion of the final grade for the class would be based on contribution and how frequently the students used the technology. The graph suggests that this reminder was only effective temporarily, as the level of activity declined significantly towards the end of the semester. In summary, findings from the survey suggest that the wiki technology was useful to manage and update existing knowledge, such as article summaries from a prior class. However, the technology was not effective in fostering collaborative creation of new knowledge.

4.7 Interview Results

The students were asked what they perceived the instructor's objectives to have been in using the wiki. The majority claimed that the instructor's prime motivation had been to enable students to gain familiarity in using and working with knowledge management systems. Several student responses pertaining to this question are as follows:

The instructor was interested in introducing some aspect of groupware to complement the class.

The main objective was to evaluate a knowledge management tool with the possibility of combining a technical element to support the delivery of knowledge within a knowledge management class and to examine if the wiki can be used as a tool to facilitate knowledge management in future classes.

I believe the instructor's goal was to allow the students to explore, test and administer an online collaborative tool and determine whether or not it was a successful knowledge management tool.