Adding power to educational and research wikis with Semantic MediaWiki

Daniel Schneider & Julien DaCosta

TECFA, University of Geneva

Mediawikis are used for various purposes in both education and research. This short position paper and summary of a talk submitted to SMWCon Fall 2013 attempts to catalog some use cases and then discuss how Semantic Mediawiki (SMW) extensions could enhance the user experience in educational and research wikis. We will draw on our own experience with EduTechwiki and related sister sites and on a short literature review. We shall focus on education, but include enhancements to informal research wikis, since sometimes the two are combined.

Objectives

The aim of this contribution is to help creating a small informal community that will push reflections a bit further, for example by:

• documenting other use cases;
• identifying a place to share SMW vocabularies, templates, forms, etc. for education and research;
• getting some advice from experienced developers of SMW applications in other areas;
• suggesting new features of general interest for existing extensions;
• identifying some stumbling blocks for new users of SMW technology.
• brainstorming about new developments, including new SMW extension and/or using the Wiki API with external applications.

We also aim participating in the creation of an educational track at WikiSym 2014.

Wikis in education

Educational use of wikis is widespread, probably in the hundreds of thousands, e.g. Wikispaces alone claims to support over 10 million teachers and students in over 100'000 wikis. MediaWikis are much less popular. However, in particular in higher education, the technology is popular since it supports the creation of large and sophisticated sites for a large variety of purposes. There is an extensive literature on the educational use of wikis, addressing for example technology acceptance issues, various forms collaborative and project-oriented learning, professional development, sharing of course notes, creation and use of open textbooks, etc. Few publications seem to document educational use of MediaWikis (e.g. Höller & Reisinger), some document using Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia (e.g. Carver et al. 2010; Chiang et al. 2012) or Wikibooks (e.g. Baltersen, 2010) and even less the use of Semantic Mediawiki (e.g. Dimitrova, 2011)

Below we present a short taxonomy of different cases of educational use that is based on our own experience, and Parker and Chao, 2007

Educational uses of wikis

Purpose	Learner activities	Examples
Writing-to-learn activities	Typically, students would write a paper, either individually, individually with some peer critique or in groups
Documenting cases	Learners will have to produce structured description of cases, for example a field observation, an artifact like a software, or definitions
Wiki textbooks and resources	Wikis can be used to produce textbooks. In variants students can/must contribute. In yet another variants, classes will use Wikipedia or other resources.	Cotta, 2010
Wikis for course management	Teachers can define all course-related pages (syllabus, modules, assignments) etc. in the Wiki. He/she also could use the wiki as textbook as above. In a variant learners use the discussion pages as forums and also could upload products and create wiki page as above, and create portfolios of their work.
Project-oriented learning	Learners, individual or in groups use the wiki for project work in its various stages. There are many variants. Each may include, for example, definig project goals and plans, collecting information such as links and definitions, track progress, writing/answering questions, writing a report, writing a paper, etc.
Inquiry learning	Inquiry learning is an important variant of project-oriented learning that may even put more emphasis on writing and re-writing. Student work starts with a vague question, that progressively must be refined and answered.
Student written text books	Instead of consuming a textbook, students contribute to writing a textbook. An alternative would be student-led initiatives to create lecture notes in higher education
Note taking, knowledge integration and linking	A wiki can help learners to prepare dissertations and/or keep track of good ideas, definitions, links, references, etc.

Wikis for supporting research

Wikis can be used for various research purposes, including (a) note taking in individual, collaborative, or collective settings, (b) managing documentation of cases and other field study information, (c) managing data and bibliographies, (d) managing the whole process and (e)(pre)publishing findings.

A number of papers report successful use of MediaWikis with Semantic Mediawiki extensions for research purposes (e.g. Jiang et al. 2010); Alquier, 2010; Kumar, 2012)

Our own experience is twofold. Firstly, we have been using EduTechWiki for years to write down ideas and prepare for literature reviews, e.g. it has become a resource kit or in other words, some kind of external memory. Since contents are shared, many others can and do profit. Second, we started using Semantic Forms to document cases and artifacts in a EU project on citizen cyberscience.

Hurdles

Collaboration

Judd, Kennedy and Cropper (2010), in a study, found little evidence of collaboration despite adopting a learning design that was intended to support it. This matches our own experience across various settings and other literature, e.g. Cole (2009). The now large "Wikipedia" literature also provides similar evidence for the population at large. Finally, the whole literature on collaborative learning points out the need for strong scaffolding of learner activities.

Technical difficulties

New wiki users (learners, teachers, researchers) encounter many difficulties. In contrast to the unsubstantiated discourse on the high ICT capacities of the new generation, often called "digital natives" or "generations Y and Z". Today's learners do indeed have good skills for networking and trading digital artifacts, but seem to possess lower ICT skills than the generation 20 years ago, lack information processing skills, and in addition many are afraid of the computer (Cole, 2009; Wecker, 2007; Selwyn, 2009; Margaryan, 2011).

In our own experience, Wiki skills are almost unexistent. Very few users seem to understand the "flat" nature of the wiki and the need for respecting some organizational guidelines, e.g. using meaningful titles for wiki pages. Even learning about 10 different wiki syntax commands seems to be a challenge. In addition, users get lost and tend to ignore various navigation aids, such as categories.

Integration in a wiki space

Most users seem to perceive a wiki as a simple collection of pages as opposed to an organized hypertext. Our wikis include many student productions. In the french version, only our own students, whereas in the English version we had contributions from different other institutions. Unless students are forced, they do no link to other pages or improve existing articles. Teachers (other then the main author) do not seem to be overly concerned by the problem, since like students, they focus on individual productions and not the wiki as a whole.

Writing apprehension and public writing

While few students seem to posses deep writing apprehension, engaging in public writing and being able to intervene in sections written by others is a problem.

Additional problems arise when teachers engage students in contributing to Wikipedia since it also requires learning about Wikipedia guidelines and culture (Every et al.(2010)).

Issues and problems

We starting learning SMW technology sometimes in summer 2013 and could identify a few issues. Some of these could be fairly easily solved while others would require more long term planning.

While documentation is fairly abundant, it is not easy for a beginner to integrate various pieces of the global puzzle in order to get going. For example, in order to understand how to make simple use of Semantic Forms, one must understand: Semantic Web principles, Wiki templates and parser extensions, and Semantic MediaWiki principles. So far, there is only one good book for wiki administrators (Koren, 2012 ). It requires good technical reading skills and may to concise for absolute beginners.

Installation and configuration of various MediaWiki extensions is fairly easy, but it can be difficult to figure how to combine the right versions. Many extensions do rely on others and only work with specific versions. We found that working with alpha code (pulled from the GIT master) gave best results, but in institutional settings, many system administrators may be reluctant to do so. A wiki also may include older extensions that will break.

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