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Technology Transfer and Teacher Learning

This project was about exploring collaboration between teachers as well as students. We wanted to see if we could use collaboration between teachers to enhance our ability to learn about and use new technology. Through collaboration and iteration, we efficiently transfered knowledge of how to work with wikis and significantly increased our effectiveness in using this technology. Analysis of the wikis indicates that Michelle and Polly increased both the quantity and quality of their wiki use from the first to the second time they taught their class and that Peggy and Suzanne were able to have a “head start,” making more effective initial use of the wiki than Michelle and Polly did.

Polly is our first adopter. She has been using wikis and blogs in classes since 2006. When she paired up to teach with Michelle, Polly brought wikis with her. While Michelle knew of wikis and planned to try them out some day, the chances of her doing so in the foreseeable future were slim. Had she tried out wikis on her own, she would have been much more conservative and less effective in how she used them. When Suzanne and Peggy signed up to teach a Bridge program class, Polly and Michelle introduced them to wikis. Thus, through collaboration, three teachers who were not likely to attempt this new technology did so and did so more effectively than they would have on their own. For more on our individual response to using wikis, see the SideBar.

Michelle and Polly’s use of the wiki increased dramatically from their first to their second class. They increased both the overall use of the wiki and student use of the wiki, going from twenty-eight wiki pages in their first class to fifty-five in their second effort, a ninety-six percent increase (See Comparison of Wiki Use table below). The number of student words increased from 14,331 on their first wiki to 65,701 student words in the second class, a 359 percent increase even though they had five fewer students in the second class. Thus, the average number of words per student went from 1,102 to 8,213, a 645 percent increase. The ratio of teacher to student words went from one teacher word for every 2.7 student words in the first class, to one teacher word for every three student words in the second class. Perhaps more significantly, Michelle and Polly decreased teacher authoring and increased student authoring of pages from the first to the second class. In their first class, ten of the pages were teacher and eighteen were student pages (where who created the page determines to whom it belongs). In their second class, seven were teacher and forty-eight were student pages. Thus, they decreased the teacher pages by thirty percent and increased the student pages by 167 percent.

Comparison of Wiki Use 

Team 1 = Michelle and Polly     Team 2 = Suzanne and Peggy

Try 1 = Winter 2007     Try 2 = Fall 2007

As these numbers indicate, Michelle and Polly were more willing and able to use the wiki as a learner-centric tool as they became more familiar and comfortable with it. Initially, Michelle and Polly used the wiki primarily as a teaching tool designed to inform rather than prompt learning. The communication was one way from teachers to students. They posted assignments, handouts and class agendas to the wiki, only using the wiki for student learning with the group conduct manual assignment. In their second version of the class, Michelle and Polly increased their use of the wiki for student learning and gave students more control over the wiki. They still used the wiki for course management purposes and added a table of contents to help student more easily navigate the wiki. In addition, Michelle and Polly had students create their own wiki pages and post drafts, self assessments, and final portfolios on the wiki. Michelle and Polly responded to student drafts on the wiki, engaging students in a three-way conversation about their writing, and added another collaborative writing assignment, putting students in pairs to edit the Pride and Prejudice Wikipedia page.

When comparing Michelle and Polly’s initial use of the wiki to Suzanne and Peggy’s, we found that Suzanne and Peggy started out using their wiki as a learning tool and were more successful in engaging students with the wiki. Like Michelle and Polly, Suzanne and Peggy used the wiki for course management (to post assignments, handouts and class agendas) and as a discussion board for students to answer teacher-posed questions on the readings. However, their main use of the wiki was for students to collaboratively author a paper. The students used the wiki for project management; to brainstorm, narrow and pick a thesis; to share research; to outline and to draft their papers.

Building from Michelle and Polly's experience and adapting the wiki to the needs of their course, Suzanne and Peggy were more successful in engaging students on the wiki than Michelle and Polly had been in their first attempt. While Michelle and Polly had twenty-eight pages on their first wiki, Suzanne and Peggy has forty-three, a fifty-four percent increase over Michelle and Polly. Suzanne and Peggy increased the number of student words 103 percent over Michelle and Polly’s first effort with 29,036 for Suzanne and Peggy and 14,331 for Michelle and Polly. The average number of words per student increased fifty-five percent from 1,102 for Michelle and Polly to 1,708 for Peggy and Suzanne. Peggy and Suzanne also increased the number of words from teachers fifty-two percent over Michelle and Polly’s first effort, from 5,314 for Michelle and Polly to 8,090 for Peggy and Suzanne. Of all three classes, Peggy and Suzanne had the highest student to teacher word ratio, with 3.6 student words for every one teacher word, as compared to 2.7 student words in Michelle and Polly’s first class and three student words in their second class.

Interestingly, Peggy and Suzanne also had the most teacher pages, thirty-one, compared to ten the first time Michelle and Polly taught the class and seven the second time. While Michelle and Polly had eighteen student pages the first time and forty-eight the second time, Peggy and Suzanne had only twelve student pages. This difference is because students in Peggy and Suzanne's class worked together on group pages. In Michelle and Polly’s first venture, students worked on separate pages, but then had to knit all of their work together, generating more initial pages. In Michelle and Polly’s second effort, students each had their own page. This increased the number of student pages, but also created a silo effect that was somewhat mitigated by the group project, but could have been better addressed by having students peer respond with links to each other’s papers.

Peggy and Suzanne used a wiki again in the next class they developed. They plan to continue using wikis as a classroom management tool and hope to increase their use of it as a learning tool and a communication forum for students. As Michelle and Polly prepare to teach their class again, they plan to replace their reading questions with an exercise in which students add linked comments to posted texts as Farabaugh (2007) did. They will also have students use the wiki for peer revision online so that students can take more advantage of being able to see each other's drafts.