Wiki Overview

What wiki activities will happen this term?

To make the process of building the BA271 Wiki as productive as possible, I have broken the overall activity into a bunch of much smaller parts as follows:

Wiki Overview

Why I am changing the ground rules for BA271 in mid-course?

This lengthy editorial describes a collection of changes I am making to how BA271 will be conducted for the rest of the term. Please take the time to read and consider its ideas. I do not want you to be surprised or caught off guard by these changes. Also, I need your help if these changes are going to produce positive results.

Normally, I make very few changes to a class in the middle of a term. Unless something important and unexpected happens, I do not want to set up one set of ground rules, let everyone become accustomed to them, and then change the rules.

Something unexpected has happened. A huge gulf has grown between my hopes for the wiki activity and the view most students have of the activity today. The evidence is everywhere: in the relative lack of activity in the BA271 Wiki, in the comments posted in the BA271 Wiki that question the value of the activity, and in what I hear when I listen to my students.

Because I had never asked students to work as a team on a wiki before, I did not know how to organize the activity, and I did not know what to expect. So I trusted my inherent belief in simply asking people to rise to a challenge. As an example, I believe, “To find an honest person, begin by trusting the people around you.” For this reason, I asked you to agree to an honor code (prior to taking the Prerequisite Exam), and I’ve spent my time working with you to complete activities rather than checking to see whether you were cheating.

More to the point, I know open source software projects and wikis tend to evolve organically. People volunteer to help build and maintain them from a joint sense of civic pride about working toward a common good. Another motivating factor comes from earning a reputation among on-line peers for being helpful or providing innovative contributions. So I decided to try the same thing with my class. I issued an open-ended request to contribute to the BA271 Wiki; that is, I asked each of you to participate in building a body of knowledge collectively.

Unlike the honor code – which I believe has been widely respected – my request to have you participate in building a wiki has generated confusion and resentment. This wasn’t the result I expected, and I will plead guilty to an initial spell of naive optimism. In retrospect, it is fairly easy to identify why my request produced this reaction:

• Students want to succeed; but it wasn’t clear what they had to do to succeed at this activity. I didn’t provide clear criteria about what had to be done or how the activity would be evaluated.
• Conducting original research requires skills that I did not teach. Every student knows how to read Chapter 12 to prepare for a multiple-choice test, but relatively few students know how to explore a new area of knowledge.
• 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.
• I didn’t explain why contributing to a wiki is more important to the course than the traditional “hands-on” activities. This made it possible for people to conclude the BA271 Wiki was the professor’s pet project rather than “what the course should be teaching us”.
• The course evaluation system had many more points associated with the “hands-on” activities than the Wiki Contributions activity. An astute observer would logically place the most attention on easy-to-earn points from the “hands-on” skills portion of the course while ignoring the more nebulous portion dealing with wikis.
• Writing well requires skills many students have not developed yet, so these students naturally avoid activities that require them 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.
• It wasn’t clear how to start the wiki activity. In most areas of life, “Well begun is half done.” I should have given everyone a list of simple activities that could be completed fairly easily to jump-start the process.

One mark of a competent professional is to do things correctly without dropping the ball. I will plead guilty with respect to meeting that standard – any Monday-morning quarterback could claim the bulleted list above should have been obvious prior to the start of the term. Another mark of a competent professional is a willingness to admit mistakes and adapt appropriately. OK, I screwed up, and this collection of web pages explains how I plan to repair things.

Why is this wiki activity important?

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. I can see similar reactions among my students this term. This makes it critical for me to explain why this wiki activity lies at the heart of what this course needs to teach. If I am able to make this case convincingly, I suspect the vast majority of students will buy into making an honest effort to complete the activity.

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 very 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 a survey class like BA271 doesn’t have 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) – the usual approach to teaching the class is to require students to read a 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 asked the class to work cooperatively on an original research activity … to explore how wikis might be used at Oregon State University. 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.

Why should you conduct original Information Systems research?

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.

How do wikis fit in the evolution of human communication?

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 today’s high definition 50-inch plasma panels. This makes it hard to imagine what wikis of the future are likely to 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 clearly 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 the foggy 1930s TV images. This raises an interesting question: Are we are too early in the evolution of wikis to predict how they will impact our world?

Why are wikis a disruptive technology?

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.

How can you make a useful contribution to the BA271 Wiki?

You can choose to make any useful contribution to any publicly accessible wiki for this overall assignment. Thus, if you want to make entries about Corvallis in WikiTravel, that will be fine. On the other hand, an important goal of the BA271 Wiki is to conduct original research into how wikis might be used at Oregon State University. Let’s assume you are willing to help with that task, but you don’t know how to begin.

The first step is to ask an interesting research question. Once you have an interesting question, it will guide you toward useful places to look for facts and answers.

Here are questions I think would be interesting to explore. It took me about an hour to generate the first 24 questions below – I’m optimistic that I will find time to come back and extend the list later:

1. What are the top 10 wikis in terms of: usage, number of articles submitted, total storage volume of data?
2. How does the growth of the usage of wikis compare to growth curves for radios, TVs, or the Internet?
3. Lots of different wiki engines exist. How do commercial wiki engines compare to open source wiki engines?
4. Where can you find good comparative information about the different engines?
5. What wikis have failed, either on campus at OSU or elsewhere? Are there any commonalities or predictive factors that might make you think a new wiki will fail?
6. Choose a specific wiki and use it enough to answer:
   • What does this wiki do well, and where does it fall short?
   • How does this specific wiki compare to using other sources of information?
   • Are limitations of this wiki likely to fade with more entries and editing … or are they inherent to the wiki?
7. What factors are common among the most successful wikis?
8. What academic research has been done about wikis and their effect?
9. What trade literature or reports of how wikis have been used have appeared in the popular press?
10. Find and interview someone who has set up a wiki. What have they learned from the experience? What advice do they have?
11. What legal issues have wikis raised? Have any court cases or rulings been filed?
12. What is the difference between a wiki and a blog? Why do so many wiki engines also support the creation of blogs?
13. How does a wiki deal with having two people attempt to edit the same page at the same time?
14. What standards of behavior are evolving about how to edit wikis?
15. What tools or methods are used to help build a sense of community among people who edit wikis?
16. Is there a cultural difference between a typical blogger and someone who contributes to a wiki?
17. What organizations exist to promote the use or hosting of wikis?
18. How have traditional publishing organizations, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica or others, reacted to the emerging wiki threat?
19. How might wikis evolve in the future? What features can you expect from the most advanced wiki engines today, and what features do not exist today but might be nice to have?
20. Many wiki engines are based on open source software. What is open source software, and why has it been exploding in popularity? What organizations promote the use of open source software?
21. Are there similarities between the thinking of folks who work on open source software projects and folks who contribute to wikis?
22. Who is Richard Stallman (an early author of software now found in Linux) and how do his ideas relate to wikis?
23. What effects are wikis likely to have on different functional areas of life: education, third-world countries, politics, business-to-business communications, business-to-customer communications.
24. Find someone who has a lot of experience with providing entries to a wiki, such as one of the most prolific volunteer editors of Wikipedia. Find out what motivates you to spend so much time editing a wiki? What insights do you have about how OSU might use wikis?
25. Try benchmarking; that is, finding comparable examples and testing them to see how well they work. You might do this by searching for wikis at other universities. Are they successful? If so, would similar wikis likely work at OSU?
26. How might web syndication and RSS technology be used in conjunction with a wiki?

Once you have selected a question, the next step is, "How do you follow up on it by finding relevant information?" If I had more time now, I continue with these thoughts. But instead, I expect to continue this discussion in our Monday evening lectures.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
[College of Business Home Page] [OSU Home Page] [OSU Disclaimer]