Wiki Overview
Most students know very little about wikis. If you fall into this
category, then you need to learn a bunch of basic concepts about them.
- If you are not familiar with what a wiki is, begin by reading,
What is a Wiki?
- Now that you know what a wiki is, read Wikipedia's definition of a
wiki. This definition
describes how wiki pages are edited, linked, and created. Parts of this
page are a bit technical, and you can skim those parts. Focus on how
wiki pages are edited, linked, and created.
- Find out what
Wikipedia is. Why has it been so successful? Read this page
carefully.
- Read How Wikis
Work, a multipage article on
HowStuffWorks.com. Concentrate on these pages:
- Page 1: How
Wikis Work. A basic overview of how a wiki functions.
- Page 2: Understanding a Wiki Community. The concept of a community of
people who work together lies at the heart of why I want to create a
healthy OSU wiki.
- Page 3: Vandalism
and Edit Wars . This explains how a wiki can protect itself against
malicious mischief. It also explains how a wiki like Wikipedia deals
with controversial topics.
- Explore the huge variety of existing wikis at
WikiIndex. What is the
difference between a vibrant wiki and a needs-love wiki?
- An important goal for BA271 this term will be to improve and extend
the
OSU
Wiki;
that is, a wiki with information about Oregon State University and its
surroundings. To understand what might go into this sort of wiki, you
should explore these university wikis:
- CaseWiki: the
official wiki of Case Western University.
- Clemson
University: "The Clemson Reference that anyone can edit."
- OberWiki:
a student-run wiki for Oberlin College. "OberWiki has a variety
of goals, many of them geared towards providing information not
available anywhere else, and acting as a hub of opinions on various
aspects of life at Oberlin." Source:
About
Oberwiki.
- UMassWiki:
another student-founded wiki ... for the University of Massachusetts
Amherst.
- Another important goal for these Wiki Activities is to make positive
improvements; that is, contributions of real value to the wikis that you
edit. To do this, you need to understand the policies and culture of how
each wiki expects people to behave. Along these lines, I want everyone
to read
Wikipedia's Policies and Guidelines page. If you skip this reading
assignment, do not be surprised if it has a real and negative effect on
your long-run scores for these activities.
When I was a student, I did well when I understood and agreed with class
activities. If something seemed unfair or spurious, I would boycott the
activity. This makes it critical for me to explain why this wiki activity
lies at the heart of what this course needs to teach.
Why am I an Information Systems professional?
To understand the rest of this document, it will help to know a bit more
about me. For example, why did I stop working as a Division Finance Manager
at Tektronix? As one of the rising stars in the firm, I was being groomed
for rapid advancement and was earning more money than I could reasonably
spend.
In the 1970s, it was not easy to adapt new technology to actual business
settings, so a lot of major computer projects failed miserably. While I was
working at Tektronix, I had a first-hand view of how a large Materials
Requirements Planning software development project spiraled downhill to a
disastrous ending. Along the way, I observed the efforts of talented people
who worked on the project. This left me really curious. I wanted to know how
so much time and talent could lead to such abject failure. So I decided to
go to graduate school. Three years later I had earned both Masters and Ph.D.
degrees in Systems Science from top-ranked Carnegie-Mellon University. With
these credentials and the genetic skills that I inherited from my parents, I
could work in whatever university or business attracted my interest – I was
a hot commodity on the job market.
Why I am teaching BA271 at Oregon State University?
Despite offers from “more prestigious” schools, I choose to come to OSU
because I love Oregon, and I like OSU’s land grant mission that emphasizes
practical knowledge. You could say, I’m a Beaver Believer. (I’m thinking of
the friendly Benny Beaver, not the more recent rabid and angry-looking
beaver.)
I really like the Information Systems profession because it lets me apply
new technologies to solve practical business problems. Fortunately this task
has gotten much easier in the last 30 years – partly because so many quality
off-the-shelf software solutions exist now. It does not take a rocket
scientist to select the right tool from the shelf and begin using it
effectively, but nonetheless, the ability to do this well remains in short
supply, so IT professionals are well paid and tend to have really
interesting jobs.
As the most senior member of the college’s Information Systems faculty, I
could teach any Information Systems course I want. Most of my
tenured-professor colleagues choose to teach specialized topics in graduate
or upper-division courses. I’ve selected a different approach: I like
teaching BA271 – a
sophomore-level survey course – because I can see such a huge difference
between what students can do and understand at the beginning of the term
from what they know at the end.
What should BA271, Information Technology in
Business, teach?
One part of BA271 teaches a bunch of hands-on computing skills. This sort
of skill is best learned by working through exercises backed up by asking
students to demonstrate the skill in lab-based exam settings. Viewed
narrowly, these skills form a collection of tricks and techniques for
formatting and organizing information electronically. To build an exam for
this portion of the course, I can snap a picture of the screen and ask
students to “make your screen look like this”. Then I can check to see if
each student’s work looks identical, awarding scores based on an ability to
mimic. This sort of “monkey-see, monkey-do” learning works well for
mastering fairly mechanical activities – like riding a bicycle, playing
tennis, or recreating a simple spreadsheet model – but it doesn’t capture
the importance or excitement of why Information Systems play such a critical
role in organizations today.
A second part of BA271 involves looking at the role Information Systems
play in how an organization functions and competes. To understand this
portion of the course, it may help to compare it to micro- and
macro-economics:
- Microeconomics looks at how a single person or firm should optimize
their behavior – which is much like looking at how a personal computer
can be used to make a single person more effective.
- Macroeconomics looks at how large systems can produce results much
different than a microeconomic view would predict. The same is true of
Information Systems. What you learn from hands-on computing provides a
poor basis for understanding how a business or organization should go
about selecting and using technology.
Despite the importance of this large system view, this second part of
BA271 turns out to be difficult to teach. Across the nation, professors have
struggled with how to engage students in the sort of complex and messy
decision-making processes used to think through how to apply technology to
solving actual business problems. Unlike teaching hands-on skills, there is
no simple way to compare student work to the “right answer” – because there
often is no single “right answer.”
 Since
an overview class like BA271 surveys the entire Information Systems field,
there isn't enough time to teach systems analysis
skills – topics like how to normalize a database, create a dataflow diagram,
conduct benchmark testing, or write an RFP (Request for Proposal). So
instead of teaching these system analysis skills, the
usual pedagogical approach forces students to read a
thick textbook. Lots of Management Information Systems textbooks exist, and one of
the most popular is written by a husband and wife team who last name is Laudon (see the picture on the right).
I could require BA271 students to buy this sort of textbook. (These books
are typically quite expensive, but that doesn’t seem to concern most
professors because publishers send free review copies to instructors.) Using
a traditional Information Systems textbook would have many advantages:
- I could assign readings from the textbook rather than building and
maintaining a complex class website.
- I could build and score exams rapidly: these books come with
extensive text banks so instructors do not need to write their own exam
questions. By using multiple-choice and true-false questions along with
mark-sensed forms and Number 2 pencils, all exams could be graded by
computer.
- Students would generally be happier because they would know exactly
what was expected of them: read and regurgitate. This is also known as
“cram and flush.”
- Students could read about using a computer which is much easier than
actually using a computer. This would avoid the messy details of buggy
software, system crashes, network storage locations, and so on. My life
would be less complicated because I wouldn’t need to offer help sessions
or diagnose problems associated with computer-based activities.
- Students would learn a lot of jargon and IT concepts, and this would
allow them to converse with IT professionals as if they knew how to
apply the ideas in an actual business setting. And since roughly half of
any business activity is based on flash-and-sizzle rather than
substance, this would prepare students half-way for real work.
Obviously, based on the way I have described these “advantages”, I have
deep reservations about the traditional textbook approach.
So this term, I decided to try a different approach for the second part
of BA271: I am asking the class to work cooperatively on an original research
activity … to build the first Oregon State University wiki.
This sort of project-based, learning-by-doing builds the skills used by
Information Systems professionals every day as they struggle to keep up with
changing technology. It also should build the framework for storing helpful
knowledge about all aspects of Oregon State University ... something that
should have lasting value.
Most areas of life are well explored. People have been cooking, driving,
wooing the opposite sex, and talking for a long time. Studying these
activities may be valuable and fun, but because these fields evolve slowly,
it isn’t necessary for ordinary people to conduct cutting-edge research in
these areas.
The information systems field is unlike any other in that it is driven by
constant, unrelenting, exponential change. Each year, the cost of hardware
drops roughly 30 percent. This has kept up year after year after year after
year since before 1960.
Here are a couple of examples of what this has meant in my life:
- When I took my first computer class at Carnegie-Mellon University in
1978, I can remember the instructor floating into class one day with his
feet barely touching the ground because he was so happy. Right before
class, he had learned that IBM had decided to drop the cost of a
megabyte of main memory to $10,000 (from $16,000). Since he had recently
ordered (but had not yet received) three megabytes of memory, this
announcement meant his university budget was going to have an extra
$18,000 left over.
- Jumping forward, I remember buying a new personal computer around
1985, and I equipped it with what seemed like a spacious 4 megabytes of
main memory at a cost of $300 per megabyte.
- Today you can buy a 512-megabyte flash drive (with faster and more
reliable memory) for about 4 cents per megabyte.
 The
world’s best experts predict this sort of change will continue year after
year into the future – with one significant difference: The pace of change
is increasing. It appears our society is headed a singularity; that is, a
time at which the creation of more intelligent computer systems happens more
rapidly than humans can follow. Ray
Kurzweil is the leading proponent of this kind of thinking. I like his
most recent book, The Singularity is Near,
so much that I've bought 15 copies and given them away to friends and
colleagues.
All this means you cannot trust a textbook to explain what makes sense
with Information Systems technology. Any textbook author’s ideas will
necessarily be several years stale by the time they arrive in print.
In this sort of environment, you need to know how to find out what is
happening in the IT field from up-to-date sources. Sometimes this means
reading recently written ideas on the web. Other times this involves
downloading and using trial versions of software directly. Other methods of
just-in-time learning – such as talking with professional colleagues or
attending a trade show – may make sense. Overall, original research tends to
be disorganized, opportunistic, lively, highly engaging, and unpredictable.
People that find it fun and can do it well are worth a whole lot more in the
marketplace than a clerical employee who is good at "hands-on" computing.
As computers and networks continue connecting all parts of our world
together, they are changing how people communicate. Humans are social
animals, and the way humans organize into societies depends on the
communication tools they have available. This makes it important to think
through how wikis fit within the long-term evolution of human communication.
Obviously, we can say little about how humans might have communicated in
pre-historical times. The earliest historical records come from paintings in
caves, carvings in stone, and marks on clay tablets and parchment. They
mostly were used to memorialize hunting activities, business transactions
and political leaders. These early forms of writing had no easy method of
copying an original, so scribes made copies by hand—a slow and tedious
process.
In Plato and Aristotle’s time, most political speech was oratorical—word
of mouth. This system of one-to-many communication was limited both in how
far the words could be shouted and in how long they persisted in the air.
People had to congregate in groups in order to exchange ideas.
A huge breakthrough occurred with Gutenberg’s invention of movable type
around 1440 in Germany. This system allowed him to print a page of text by
shoving a lever which pressed paper onto an inked surface consisting of many
individual letters of type. After enough copies had been printed, the type
could be rearranged into a new page of text for the next batch of copies. In
the next 100 years; that is, by 1540, this system made the cost of a printed
page 100 times cheaper.
Gutenberg’s printing press was the first true one-to-many method of
communication. It gave “the power of the press” to anyone who could afford
to buy one. It also sparked the Renaissance and lead to the demise of the
feudal system.
Radio, television, and offset presses made further cost and speed
improvements on one-to-many communications.
Telephones and email, which are one-to-one methods of communication, led
people to connect computers together in networks. Collectively these
improvements seem responsible for the rapid spread of democracy and
increasingly free societies around the world – it is hard for a despot to
maintain top-down control over a country’s population if everyone can see
how much nicer other forms of political organization are.
With the rise of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, we saw the first
form of many-to-many communication; that is, anyone with a healthy dose of
technical skill could rent space on a web server and create a static website
that anyone else could see. People no longer needed to own a printing press,
radio, or television station to publish ideas.
By linking web-based forms with a back-end database, websites can collect
and process business transactions. This transformed business-to-business and
business-to-consumer interactions and led to such a frenzy of enthusiasm in
the late 1990s that when reality finally dawned with the DotCom implosion,
the entire world went through a recession.
A wiki extends a traditional website by making it easy for anyone to edit
or revise the site’s content. The early wikis we have today have crude and
clunky-looking interfaces. They make me think about how crude early
black-and-white TVs seem when compared to high definition 50-inch
plasma panel on my living room wall. I wonder what future wikis will look like.
My personal vision involves lots more motion and video
feeds than are found in wikis today, along with voice recognition and hand
gestures so editing and reformatting the pages will no longer require
typing.
Nonetheless, even in their crude initial incarnation, wikis are an entirely new way for humans to work together in teams. Unlike a
traditional website or blog,
they allow people from all over the planet to collaborate on building a
shared knowledge base.
I don’t see how people looking the ghost-like images on the first TVs in
the 1930s could have understand how thoroughly TVs would change everyday
life. The typical American now spends six hours each day watching TV – which
I find rather sad. This would have been hard to predict while looking at a foggy 1930s TV image. This raises an interesting question: Are we are too
early in the evolution of wikis to predict how they will impact our world?
On February 15, 2006, I went to the Portland Society of Information
Managers club meeting, and about 25 percent of the after-dinner speech was
about wikis. The Society has identified wikis as a disruptive technology—a
new and unruly development likely to cause radical change. About sixty
managers were in the room, and they were asked via a quick show of hands to
indicate who was using wikis. About two-thirds of the people raised their
hands. Most of the wikis these people are using are internal wikis available
only to people within their organization – often the wikis are used to store
and maintain documentation about information systems projects.
Wikis are disruptive because they fundamentally change how ideas
are published: Rather than running ideas through an initial
editorial screening, they publish ideas immediately. Only later does the
real editorial process begin. Poor ideas are removed or improved. Good ideas
are extended. Outstanding ideas fork into new territory or spawn entirely
new partnerships. This lack of editorial screening means ideas do not get
filtered before making it to print. Traditional publishers find this
frightening and fret about hackers or misinformation. Other people find this
liberating.
Wikis are disruptive because they cut across traditional
boundaries. It doesn’t matter where people live—as long as they
share a common interest—they can work on a common wiki. Customers,
suppliers, manufacturers, tinkers, tailors, and candlestick makers can all
join forces without worrying about passwords or other administrative
details. Everyone can team up across time zones without the cost of postage
or phone calls.
Wikis are disruptive because their influence has been spreading so
rapidly. Wikipedia has more top-rated links from Google than any
other website – yet Wikipedia is a volunteer effort that is only a few years
old.
Why might developing an
OSU Wiki
seem initially like a poor idea?
You will not be alone if your initial reaction to creating an
OSU wiki
is negative. Here are reasons why you might feel this way:
- Most homework activities ask you to complete a well defined task for
which a known correct answer can be found. This offers a sense of
comfort because you know when you have found the right answer. But since
no one knows just what an OSU wiki should contain or how it will be
used, you won't find that sort of comfort from this activity.
- The joy of conducting original research is like the joy of jogging –
it isn’t immediately obvious. The first time someone tries jogging, the
body rebels and cries in pain. Later, it adapts and issues endorphins.
The same transition happens with conducting original research except it
is the mind which rebels initially and adapts later with “eureka”
insights.
- Writing well requires skills many students have not developed yet.
If you fit that description, you will naturally avoid activities that require
you to write.
Of course, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because the only way
to learn how to write well is to practice the skill of actually writing.
Personal Note: I hated writing with a passion when I first went to
college, and I started Writing 121 at least five times before finally
passing it. Later, my job as an accountant at Tektronix forced me to
write inventory reports and procedure manuals -- and I finally started
learning how to write clearly. Eventually, I began to
like the power that comes from effective writing ... and I wrote a
series of successful textbooks. Today, over half of my net worth has
come from textbook royalties, and I am a world-class author at
descriptive writing. Thus, I am certain writing is a skill that develops
rapidly with practice. It develops even faster when you have someone who
provides helpful editing and mentoring ideas.
- Throughout the term the
OSU wiki
will most likely remain useless for finding practical answers. It takes time
to build up enough useful content to make a new wiki truly useful. For this
reason, it will take real vision to see how important an
OSU wiki
might become. Michael Faraday explained this issue far better than I can. He
discovered that by moving an electric wire through a magnetic field, he
could produce electricity in the wire, and this discovery lies behind all
modern electric motors. When he demonstrated this discovery, a woman in the
audience asked, "But what use is it?" He responded, ""Madam, what good is a
new-born baby?"
My closing request
I have a request for you to consider: Please suspend your
reservations -- put them to the side. Instead of focusing on why
this project might not work well -- or why it may not be easy to do -- focus
on what you can do to make it work.
Give the
OSU wiki
a year to mature, and return to see whether it has become an important tool
for students on campus. If it becomes as successful as I hope, you will feel
justifiably proud about helping get it started. If it still has not gained a
critical mass, then you will have had a first-hand view of an Information
Systems failure. Either way, I suspect there will be a lot you can learn
from this effort.
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