a touch of frost

We have seen a lot of interest and activity in wikis at our institution over the past year. Much of that interest is due to the ease of use of wikis (although the wiki software we use – mediawiki – could be a lot more intuitive) and to the ease with which the affordances of wiki technology fit neatly within existing teaching and learning practice. The notion that a group can collaboratively write and edit a document is not a new one, only the notion that it can be done easily through the web is now widespread.

What is of interest is that another habit of existing teaching and learning practice (restricting access to learning activities to a particular cohort) is at odds with another fundamental affordance of wikis (the ability to publish, share, invite and allow collaboration beyond a particular class cohort). What we end up seeing here are instructors who want to use wikis, but want to restrict access to them to their particular class. Most want to restrict write and edit access, some also want to restrict read access. They want to use wikis behind the garden walls that LMS’s have long offered. They want to use wikis on their terms.

To me, this is symptomatic of a growing disconnect of mindsets that we are witnessing as we move into an always accessible, open publishing, information saturated environment. I don’t want to assume this disconnect of mindsets is based on generational lines but I believe that the practice of protecting intellectual property through means such as copyright is a mindset that is being challenged in profound ways. Creative Commons licensing, the Open Educational Resource movement, Harvard’s move to openly publish research, Wikipedia, GoogleEarth, Flickr, blogs, Facebook, etc., all are breaking down the notion that information is privileged property, is fixed in some form of immutable expression, and has a marketable value. A notion that is firmly entrenched in formal education. When information is digital, it is easy and cheap to produce and alter, and cheap and most often free to copy and alter. Information is increasingly becoming a process; a mutable, inexorable, dynamic flow, not a product. The people who still see information as a fixed product, who still want to protect and control are confronting a wave of change that seems at this point beyond control. And they want to use technologies like wikis within a protected and privileged environment, an environment at odds with the underlying philosophy of the technology.
Privacy and anonymity are still concerns, but here too, increasingly, many (especially the young) are willing to sacrifice these for the ability to publish, to access information and to connect to others. People are willing to make their lives transparent and give data miners open access to all their online activity, just as Google, Wikipedia, et al have given them open access to information.

So, is it a bad thing that wikis are being adapted and one might say subverted in educational environments? Or do we see them as another small step in an incremental change of learning with technology?

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