What's In The Wiki?

Issues of agency in light of student teachers’ encounters with wiki technology 
By Hilde Brox

0. Abstract#

1. The article discusses how and why teacher education should encourage a deeper understanding of technology, in which both human and technological agency are explored and problematized. This calls for a pedagogical setting that acknowledge the value of technological experimentation beyond recognized 'learning outcomes'.

1. introduction#

2. Agency is a term commonly connected to an individual's ability and power to act according to intent in order to bring about a desired result. In education, agency relates to the process of preparing pupils for independent adulthood and usually points to actively taking control of one's life instead of merely reacting to or repeating given practices (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2009). Can this view of agency be transferred to student teachers' dealing with technology? |1

In order to assess to what extent future teachers are indeed able to 'actively take control of their lives' and 'bring about desired results' in technology-rich settings, it seems important to look beyond merely observable traits like usage patterns or computer skills.While student teachers attitudes to technology have been investigated (Teo et al., 2007), little attention has so far been given to the digital applications they are required to apply in their future practices. |1-2

1.1 The Place of Technology in Teacher Education#

3. As far as teacher education is concerned, several reports have concluded that there is a 'slow uptake' of technologies ad still a way to go before student teacher's digital competence reaches the desired level. Reason have been identified as both human, technological and institutional: lack of competent role models, lack of coherent management support, poor integration of technology in curriculum documents, or even too much variation between institutions, to name a few.

4. Most teachers’ experience is that the choice of slide software or interactive whiteboards over chalk on a blackboard affects not only learners’ engagement but also ‘the stuff of learning’, that both ‘what goes in’ and ‘what comes out’ is affected by the particular constraints of each technology. Yet, such insights rarely rise above the intuitive level, as there is no place to reflect analytically on what such tools ‘do’. That technologies inhibit physical qualities that allow or invite certain actions to be performed with or upon them is hard to express within received discourses based on a largely implied pre-eminence of human forms of agency. |3

5. Agency emerges through constant interactions of human and non-human components. Received human-technology distinctions can thus be subsumed under the notion of socio-technical networks (or ‘assemblages’) that enable and restrain multiple forms of human and non-human agency.

6. By not explicitly addressing technologies, we also eschew the fact that technologies are not neutral, but made by humans and intended for specific purposes, inscribed with certain values and biases of designers and manufacturers (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Srinivasan, 2013). While educational rhetoric still embraces ideas of digital ‘producers’ versus ‘consumers’, Schäfer (2011), among others, has drawn attention to the ways in which ‘producers’ more often than not assume roles as both consumers and co-producers, participating ‘implicitly’ even without their awareness.

In a code-based, ‘software society’ (Manovich, 2013), technological awareness becomes an important prerequisite for agency; in fact, the concept loses its relevance unless reconfigured and understood within a broader perspective that involves technological as well as economic and political aspects (Coole and Frost, 2010; Van Dijck, 2009; Potzsch, 2017). As many researchers are now arguing, an understanding of the inherent agency of software and algorithms is particularly crucial for anyone involved in education (Saariketo, 2015; Pötzsch, 2016; Williamson, 2014).

7. If the purpose of technology in education primarily becomes to ‘support and enhance’ learning, technologies that do not comply with these goals will be dismissed. Wikis are a case in point: on the one hand hailed as particularly interesting for educational purposes (Bower et al., 2006; Lamb, 2004), and on the other deemed notoriously ‘difficult’. In essence, wikis are highly flexible tools that facilitate a wide range of uses. They enable instant web publishing of various types of content, and by first glance a wiki may look like any other web site.

Yet, due to the basic principle of shared authorship it functions in radically different ways. Unlike for instance blogs, a wiki is quickly and easily editable by any author (given rights and access) so that any type of content can be added to, altered or deleted by anyone, regardless of who put it there initially. The fact that wikis allow ‘empty’ links (marked textual content that takes the user to ‘a page that doesn’t exist’) is what primarily sets them apart from other, seemingly comparable tools.

When arriving at a page that ‘does not exist’ the user is invited to open that page: users may thus not only add content on equal terms but also influence where new pages are to be created and that way also decide the site’s structure and range. |4

8. Despite these interesting features, wikis are rarely used in education. Principles like equality, transparency, incompletion and constant change characterize wikis, and may create tension when faced with traditional educational practices such as individual assessment, closure and completeness (Lund & Smørdal, 2006). In my own experience, many teachers who are initially enthusiastic when discovering what wikis are capable of tend to give them up quickly, finding them too complex or troublesome for daily classroom routines.

There are in fact few arguments available for why teachers should want to use wikis. In the present educational climate, such a technology has no immediate value, however, as will be argued here, working with wikis may have a series of other, less obvious benefits that may prove particularly relevant for student teachers assuming wider perspectives on technology, such as an awareness of the emergent complexities of human-non-human interaction in contemporary digital networks. |4-5

1.2 'The Pedersen Family Chronicle' Wiki#

9. In addition to being a way to address genre writing, the wiki was meant to serve as an example of a 'digital teaching method' for students to develop further in their own teaching. As such, it was partly a rather typical setup in which teachers 'do something digital' in order to meet the requirements of the curriculum. |5

2. Finding and Analysis#

2.1 Logs#

10. Many of them mention how the writing could be both individual and collaborative at the same time, connecting it to 'the way the wiki works':

   The way a wiki works is just perfect: you have space to do your own thing and follow your own interest. At the same time, you can follow what others do and pick up on that if you like. Having the freedom to develop links where you want, and follow up links made by others, really makes this so much fun.

The task did not require the students to edit each other’s texts, and indeed, very few of them did. They nevertheless discover and seem to appreciate the advantages of being able to connect to texts written by others, such as adding a word or two on a page initiated by someone else so that they could link up to ‘their’ text. |8

3. Discussion#

11. The Pedersen wiki was very popular with the students who all, in both logs and interviews, assessed it as having been fun, interesting and engaging; some even claimed it was one of the most memorable highlights of their entire study. ...

For one, they express confidence and pride in having learnt to operate a complex technology, and having discovered by their own accord how to manipulate the wiki code and how that affected the layout. Moreover, their logs show a recognition and appreciations of how the wiki technology itself asserted a form of agency upon them: that the wiki’s affordances served as an integral and indispensable part of the story development. |9

12. Nevertheless, such profound interest in technology and what it does to the 'stuff of learning' runs against the popular trend that technologies should not draw too much attention to themselves. Designers and producers of digital technologies strive to achieve a seamless interface and a smooth, frictionless experience that de-emphasizes technology and its complexities.

This is often appreaciated by teachers; in lower frades, tablets are often favoured over PCs because they switch on quickly and require less 'mendling'. What is gained is naturally a more comfortable user experience, but what is lost? Gert Biesta’s (2005) point about the concept of learning seems appropriate here:

Rather than seeing learning as attempt to acquire, to master, to internalise, and what other possessive metaphors we can think of, we can also see learning as a reaction to a disturbance, as an attempt to reorganise or reintegrate as a result of disintegration. We can look at learning as responding to what is other or different, to what challenges, irritates and disturb us, rather than as the acquisition of something that we want to possess (p.62). |10

13. Thinking about technologies in instrumental terms is unfortunate for several reasons. It may hinder experimentation and innovation, and render technology encounters that do not have predefined goals as invalid or a waste of time. Technologies that do not act accord- ing to plan, provide resistance or fail to deliver improved learning outcomes will be dismissed in favour of well-trodden paths and reproduction of existing practices.

By examining 'difficult' technologies like wikis we also introduce the opportunity for challenging and demanding something from technologies. In order to become truly agentic, tomorrow's teachers need to experience that digital technologies are neither handy tools that can be implemented without consequences, nor systemic 'givens' beyond their comprehension or influence, but are parts of complex networks that combine both human and non-human actors and agencies in unprecedented manners. |11

4. Conclusion#

14. It has been argued here that these insights were enabled through a task that allowed and encouraged exploring the wiki's characteristic affordances. These insights are valuable in teacher education as they challenge both received notions of a pre-eminence of human agency and techno-determinist ideas of omnipotent systems. |12

5. References#

Biesta, G. (2005). Against Learning. Reclaiming a language for education in an age of learning. Nordisk Pedagogik, (25), 54–66.

Lipponen, L. & Kumpulainen, K. (2011): Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, (27), 812–819.

Lund, A. & Smørdal, S. (2006). Is there a space for the teacher in a WIKI? Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, August 21–23, 2006, Odense, Denmark. doi: 10.1145/1149453.1149466

Teo, T., Lee, C.B. & C.S. Chai (2007). Understanding pre-service teachers’ computer attitudes: applying and extending the technology acceptance model. Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning. 24 (2), 128– 143. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2007.00247

Manovich, L. (2013) Software Takes Command. New York et al.: Bloomsbury.

Saariketo, M. (2015). Reflections on the question of technology in media literacy education. In S. Kotilainen, & R. Kupiainen (Eds.), Reflections on media education futures: contributions to the Conference Media Education Futures in Tampere, Finland 2014. (pp. 51–61). Göteborg: The International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media, University of Gothenburg, Nordicom.

Schäfer, M. T. (2011). Bastard Culture. How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam University Press.