User:Dagonyclark/Wikis facilitation presentation

Session 15: Cognitive and Participatory Learning Tools: WIKI and Blogs - April 29, 2009 Facilitation by Sean Dagony-Clark, Phil Martin, and Dino Sossi This is a summary of A systemic and cognitive view on collaborative knowledge building with wikis by Ulrike Cress & Joachim Kimmerle GO AHEAD AND EDIT OUR PRESENTATION! We repeat GO AHEAD AND EDIT OUR PRESENTATION! EDIT ANYWHERE YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE AS A MEMBER OF COGNITION & COMPUTERS It's a wiki article about collaborative knowledge building. Adding knowledge and opinions is the whole point.

Did we miss something? Add it!

Do you have a better way of describing an idea from the article? Revise!

Addition and revision (assimilation and accommodation) are the focus of this week's article. What better way to understand them than by putting them in practice?!

Introduction - blogs & file-sharing systems v. wikis (p. 106)
blogs and file-sharing systems are knowledge repositories but do not support collaboration wikis support learning through sharing and integration of collective knowledge

Wiki advantages

 * ease of access to/modification of information
 * widespread availability
 * accessibility/simplicity of use (this is somewhat debatable)
 * ease of collaboration
 * democratic (anarchic?) knowledge building

Main research question:
What makes wikis supportive of learning and knowledge building?

Associated research questions
What processes are going on when people share their knowledge by creating wikis?

What happens when people work mutually on one common artifact, thereby introducing their knowledge to the community and building new knowledge collaboratively?

What motivates people to collaboratively build knowledge with wikis?

Tentative conclusion (p. 108)
Motivation is driven by the person's
 * 1) "perception of incongruities" in the topic
 * 2) "perceived valence," or emotional connection, to the topic

A Model of collaborative knowledge building with wikis (p. 108)
Luhmann’s sociological systems theory states that social systems can be distinguished from cognitive systems (p. 108)

Cress and Kimmerle examine the processes responsible for knowledge transfer between a social system and cognitive systems (i.e. between a wiki and its contributors)
 * this knowledge transfer occurs through processes of externalization and internalization

Social and cognitive systems (p. 108)
There are 3 different systems, according to Luhmann (p. 108)
 * The two relevant to this article are social and cognitive

Each system is closed to the others' internal processes, but systems can be influenced by the others' external processes
 * Social systems depend on cognitive systems because there would be no communication without cognition (p. 109) e.g. Social systems take on elements of cognitive systems and vice-versa.

Externalization
If a wiki is a social system and people are cognitive systems, and we've established that systems' internal processes are closed to each other, contribution to a wiki can only be done by a person externalizing her knowledge.
 * She does this by adding a representation of her knowledge to the wiki, an article for example.
 * Remember mental maps? The wiki becomes a mental map of collective knowledge.
 * She cannot contribute anything meaningful to the social system without her own corresponding cognitive knowledge
 * Her contribution can also lead her to individual learning through her own externalization
 * As she contributes and clarifies her own knowledge, she may learn from herself through her deeper processing and clarification
 * Her process is represented in Cognitive Systems 1 and 3 in Fig 1

Internalization
A reader of a wiki page can expand his own knowledge by reading and understanding new information Additionally, he can enhance his knowledge through inference based on this newly internalized knowledge
 * This internalization of knowledge is the process by which a person builds his own knowledge from an outside source
 * This enhancement through inference is called emergent knowledge
 * Through this process, new knowledge can develop on its own ... and perhaps be added into the wiki

This is a major benefit of collaborative knowledge building
 * It's one of the ways wikis can be distinguished from blogs, databases, and other knowledge repositories

In Fig. 2, the cognitive system 3 has developed such emergent knowledge (though, really, the inference should be represented by a new shape altogether)

equilibrium theory

 * people balance external and internal information by trying to make them congruous
 * if new information conflicts with existing knowledge, it causes a cognitive conflict
 * Don't worry. This is good. It leads to new knowledge.

assimilation and accommodation
two possibilities to resolve a cognitive conflict:
 * 1) assimilation
 * 2) * the individual adds new information to their existing knowledge
 * 3) * this causes no disruption of prior knowledge, just an addition of the new
 * 4) * assimilation is quantitative learning
 * 5) accommodation
 * 6) * the individual must reorganize her knowledge so that the new information fits in
 * 7) * accommodation is qualitative learning

Assimilation and accommodation also take place in a wiki.
 * New information can be added to the wiki (assimilation)
 * Information can be rearranged and reconfigured (accommodation)
 * These processes are external (because they happen outside the individual's cognitive system)


 * So in collaborative knowledge building with wikis, there are four forms of learning and knowledge building:
 * 1) Internal assimilation
 * 2) * quantitative individual learning
 * 3) * the individual adds information to her cognitive system without having to reconfigure any previous knowledge
 * 4) Internal accommodation
 * 5) * qualitative individual learning
 * 6) * in order to add information to her cognitive system, the individual must reconfigure previous knowledge to accommodate the new
 * 7) External assimilation
 * 8) * quantitative knowledge building
 * 9) * information is added to the wiki without reconfiguring its structure
 * 10) External accommodation
 * 11) * qualitative knowledge building
 * 12) * in order to add information to the wiki, its structure must be reconfigured to accommodate the new
 * 13) * to view one example of this in action,


 * this is a sample situation which helps us understand how cognitive and social systems develop mutually. Luhmann labels this mutual development “co-evolution”
 * co-evolution of systems constitutes the foundation of collaborative knowledge building

Example 1 - “Computer-supported collaborative learning” (CSCL) (p. 114)

 * A Wikipedia article on CSCL was established by one user interested in CSCL
 * Another user read the provided information, decided to act in response to this information, and contributed some external links s/he considered useful
 * This article illustrates processes of assimilation and accommodation
 * Assimilation: second user added links
 * External assimilation
 * Accommodation: other revisions link CSCL to distance education
 * Adds new information and reorganizes the old
 * External accommodation

Example 2 - “AIDS origin” (p. 116)

 * Origin of AIDS article shows many revisions, both assimilation and accommodation
 * 1) Assimilation
 * 2) * Addition of the Russian abbreviation for AIDS, SPID
 * 3) * Addition of the Irish abbreviation, SEIF
 * 4) Accommodation
 * 5) * "Contentious theory" of polio vaccine as disease's bridge to humans
 * 6) ** New idea was introduced
 * 7) ** Idea was modified by edits
 * 8) ** Idea was eventually reconfigured and incorporated into the text

Motivational processes in knowledge building (p. 117)

 * What motivates people to engage in this collective process of knowledge building?

Negative answer

 * The authors believe that people often hesitate to share their own knowledge due to the perceived "costs" of doing so. There is the task of determining their positions and actually writing them, but also the fear of embarrassing themselves by publishing information which might contain mistakes. There could also be a perception of giving away power if they share information which only they have. In knowledge-exchange settings, where the main aim is to pool information and to make it accessible, are these perceived costs real?
 * How do you feel about these barriers to participation, whether real or, in your opinion, illusory, in wiki's and other collaborative learning environments?

Positive answer

 * Following Piaget’s model of equilibration the researchers propose that people engage in knowledge building by contributing new information to wikis and by restructuring existing articles because of cognitive conflicts. Using Luhmann’s theory, this conflict can be described as irritation


 * This matching process can lead to different results: If people feel that the wiki’s information is congruent with their individual knowledge then there is no need for equilibration and people do not accommodate or assimilate, either internally nor externally. In contrast, if people feel that the wiki’s information differs from their own knowledge, there is a need for equilibration, which people can satisfy by processes of internal or external assimilation or accommodation
 * 1) If people realize that important aspects which are part of their knowledge are missing in the wiki they will perhaps externalize these and add them to the wiki (external assimilation). For example, the user who added the CSILE/Knowledge Forum link probably found that the absence of this link was a shortcoming which had to be compensated for
 * 2) If people find that the wiki’s information describes aspects which are not part of their individual knowledge they will develop new knowledge by internal assimilation
 * 3) If people find that their knowledge and the wiki’s information are basically incongruent with their knowledge they will accommodate their knowledge (internal accommodation) or
 * 4) revise the wiki article (external accommodation)
 * With internal accommodation, for example, users who did not consider CSCL to be an interdisciplinary field might modify their beliefs on CSCL fundamentally when they read the Wikipedia version
 * With external accommodation a user can decide to revise the article as we have described it in the previous section. The question is whether perceived incongruities lead to equilibration processes in every case. A user who does not care about CSCL research at all would probably not bother to deal with the subject


 * the researchers propose that the motivation for the described activities of equilibration is a function of two features:
 * 1) the size of the incongruity between the individual’s knowledge and the wiki’s information on the one hand, and
 * 2) the valence which the topic has for people on the other hand
 * the researchers propose an inverted u-shaped relation between the incongruity and the cognitive conflict with respect to the incongruity between individual knowledge and the wiki’s information

Fig. 3


 * 1) If the incongruity between the individual’s knowledge and the wiki’s information is very small, there is no need for equilibration (e.g. if a user’s knowledge about CSCL corresponds to the information in the Wikipedia article the user will neither learn anything nor will she or he revise the article)
 * 2) If the incongruity is very large, the information in the wiki and the individual’s knowledge will hardly be perceived as describing one and the same topic. This situation will reduce the need for making both congruent
 * the researchers propose that only a medium-level incongruity causes a cognitive conflict which motivates people to engage in one of the equilibration processes described above
 * In this model the incongruity between people’s individual knowledge and the wiki’s information is the motor of the system’s development
 * In a process of mutual development people learn and enhance their individual knowledge and the wiki improves, becoming more exhaustive and more complete
 * Thus, what can be observed here is a coevolutionary development of social and cognitive systems. This co-evolution of systems is the foundation of collaborative knowledge-building processes. Through equilibration the wiki tends to incorporate more and more knowledge from the users
 * 1) Through external assimilation the wiki consists of increasingly more information and thus the wiki grows.
 * 2) Through external accommodation processes it enables new understandings, allows for new emergent knowledge, and, accordingly, facilitates collaborative knowledge building.  The sense of community, and expanded learning potentials grow as well.

Discussion questions
====I've moved the question responses to the Moodle. Keep contributing to the presentation above as you see fit, but let's keep the discussion in Moodle. --Dagonyclark (talk) 02:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC) ====


 * 1) In addition to wikis, which technologies we’ve discussed this semester lend themselves to the creation of emergent knowledge?
 * 2) The authors describe wikis as “simple to use for everybody,” (p. 106). As with any other tech tool, though, they carry a learning curve because of the markup language involved. What successes have you seen in wiki-based collaboration? What about failures?
 * 3) Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia and arguably one of its most accurate. Both of these facts are due to its contributors, volunteers who create its content and then zealously guard its pages from vandals and erroneous information. While the authors cite cognitive conflict as the greatest motivator of external assimilation and accommodation, they don’t mention narcissism or pride in one’s work as contributing factors in these ultra-motivated editors. Beside cognitive conflict, what factors do you think are at play here?
 * 4) The authors cite the CSCL wiki article as an example of both assimilation and accommodation. For the latter, they describe a process by which the article was edited and revised to incorporate new knowledge about the topic. However, the revision described was made by a single contributor, was likely not the last revision, and may have been altered or even removed by a later editor. How do you feel about describing a wiki as a collaborative learning environment, when the learning is often accomplished individually? And for casual readers, for whom the valence is too low or the incongruity too high to attempt a rewrite of possibly incorrect information, can we call it a learning environment at all?
 * 5) Cress and Kimmerle close their article with indications of where their research on wiki's will go next.  Do you agree with the authors next steps?  How would you go about evaluating wiki's as a learning tool, or as a resource?

Graphical Representation of Wiki's
From Evan Prodromou:

I like to think of it like this: "wiki" is a concept associated loosely with other concepts -- tied to them in some concept-space. If we just bring together people who know and understand wiki, and have them talk together, we'll achieve very little. But if we bring together people who work, think and live in those closely-associated concept circles, we've got the opportunity for fascinating cross-cultural mixing -- passionate, creative accidents

It's interesting that in [Evan Prodromou's view], Wiki's are the center of the Web 2.0 world.--Robin611 (talk) 17:53, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Here's another representation to consider. This mindmap represents the affordances of the Web 2.0 world where Wiki's would be one implementation tool for these categorizations: