Political science professor Thad Kousser is generally seen by his students as one of the more tech-savvy faculty members: Each lecture is accompanied by PowerPoint slides, which he posts on his Web site, along with other interesting links and updates. However, as they prepared for his California politics final last quarter, the students turned to a technological innovation of their own.
As they began studying, some classmates received a mysterious e-mail directing them to a Web site on Wikipedia, the well-known user-edited online encyclopedia.
“Let[’]s compile our answers,” the site began. “The ultimate goal is to add to each other[’s] answers — cram with as much detail as possible.”
For college students, whose world in recent years has been invaded by the dominance of Facebook and Google, the experience suggests that there may be something new on the disruptive-technology horizon: the wiki.
Short for “wiki wiki,” an adjective for something “quick” or “fast” in the native Hawaiian language, the word describes a kind of easily editable Web site praised for its ability to allow groups to collaborate digitally.
“There’s no secret knowledge in my class, and anything that puts more information out there for students is a good thing,” said Kousser, who was not aware of the site his students created until an interview with the Guardian last week. Students in other classes also reported using similar wiki study guides.
Despite their current popularity with computer geeks, however, wikis are only now starting to enter the world of higher education.
“The wiki allows for faculty to do many things that faculty have always been interested in doing,” said Jonah Bossewitch, a technology and programmer analyst at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning
The center, which works to incubate new technology at the university, has helped several faculty members set up class wiki sites. And doctoral students have even used wikis to split up their research and then collaborate on the final product, Bossewitch said. One particularly attractive feature is that almost anyone can make a wiki, even if they don’t know HTML, the language used to build regular Web sites.
However, the wiki’s biggest strength — the ability of many strangers to share information — may also be its weakness.
“To be honest, my take on wikis like Wikipedia is that it’s an experiment with democracy and knowledge sharing,” said Mike Franks, a programmer with UCLA’s social sciences division, who is working on developing the wiki technology for professor use at the university. “My personal view is that I don’t trust the world; I trust the group I work with.”
For example, the study guide for Kousser’s class allowed all visitors to make changes, with no way to identify the contributors other than through their IP addresses (this writer even made an edit, in hopes of contacting the site’s creator). At a top-rate university, where students often feel like they’re competing with others, that freedom may be dangerous.
“As it does everything, the Internet takes old study techniques and amplifies their advantages and disadvantages,” said Kousser, pointing out that he found several errors in the notes on the page. “I think students should consider the risks and benefits of doing wiki study groups, in the same way they consider the risks and benefits of regular study groups.”
Last year, Wikipedia found itself faced with similar problems when it appeared in headlines of the nation’s biggest newspapers, which reported that congressional staffers edited the wiki pages of politicians to remove embarassing information.
The first entry on the encyclopedia’s rules page is “ignore all rules.” (It’s often coupled with a corollary: “Don’t be a dick.”) It’s unclear whether these will be adequate as the technology is adapted for university use.
For the wikis his center has worked on, Bossewitch said few ethical problems emerged, largely because the sites were designed to create a record of edits that kept individual users responsible.
“We have not had any incidences of malicious or adversarial competition,” he said. “Quite the opposite: People are producing much better work, in light of the fact that other people are going to be looking at it.”
Then there’s of course the perennial freerider problem.
“I don’t think it can be sustained, because of the ratio of contributions to freeloaders” said Kai Xue, the Sixth College sophomore who made the page for Kousser’s class. “It was basically one person giving a gift to many others, with nothing in return. I don’t think in the next class, that person will be so generous.”
Wikis raise other issues, as well: Though professors may welcome student collaboration in study groups, the same might not be true for class assignments, like math or chemistry problem sets. For these, Bossewitch thinks that “wikis are probably not the perfect solution, but they can play a part.” And it’s unclear whether the emergence of new technology will force universities to reconsider current academic codes of conduct.
“I don’t think [wikis] raise any more academic honesty questions than simply sharing class notes,” Kousser said. “All students have the responsibility to know what academic dishonesty is, and not do to it.”
Either way, it seems unlikely that wikis will replace actual studying in the near future. Kousser estimates that someone who knew everything on the wiki study guide would have been prepared for only roughly 66 percent of the questions on his final. According to Franks, there are also some technical challenges to creating systems that can accommodate hundreds of classes and thousands of users, as is necessary for a campus the size of UCSD.
As for the ethics involved, there is the “Wiki Prayer,” an adaptation of the “Serenity Prayer” often used by 12-step addiction programs. Bossewitch includes it on a poster he uses to demonstrate the potential wikis have as a pedagogical tool: “Please, grant me the serenity to accept / the pages I cannot edit / The courage to edit the pages I can / And the wisdom to know the difference.”
