Understanding and Transforming Online CollaborationAmy BruckmanAssociate Professor

Great Uncle Oscar’s Wikipedia Page

• Oscar Brodney – Born February 18th, 1907– Hollywood screenwriter– Nominated for an Oscar

• Screenplay for The Glenn Miller Story– Other credits:

• Harvey• Tammy and the Bachelor• Francis the Talking Mule• Abbott & Costello’s Mexican Hayride• Etc.

– I have edited his Wikipedia page• On my watchlist

Outline

• Constructionist learning• Understanding Wikipedia

– Interviews with:• Regular contributors • Administrators • Leaders of Wikiprojects • People banned from the site

• An educational application of this technology– Science Online

• Extending the paradigm– Leadership in online creative collaboration

Constructionist Learning

• Piaget’s constructivism• Papert’s constructionism

– Examples:• LOGO• LEGO Mindstorms• StarLogo• Scratch

• Designing construction kits– Personal connections– Epistemological connections

Constructionist Online Communities

• People creating something together online– Stricter sense: artifact– Looser sense: shared understanding

• Community provides both motivation and support:– Technical support– Emotional support– Role models– An appreciative audience

Understanding Wikipedia

• Have you edited Wikipedia?• Do you have a watch list?• “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only

works in practice. In theory, it can never work.” (New York Times, 4/23/07)

What Makes Wikis Unique?

• Constructionist learning (Papert, Resnick)– Learning by working on personally meaningful projects– Learning through design and construction activities– Low barrier to entry– Easy learning curve– No ceiling

• Extremely light weight– Small differences in accessibility change user behavior

• Example: editing without logging in

• Collaboration on a large-scale

Becoming Wikipedian:Transformation of Participation• Interviews with 21 “Wikipedians”

• Becoming a part of Wikipedia is a process of:– Legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger), in a

– Knowledge-building community (Scardamalia & Bereiter)

• Andrea Forte, Susan Bryant et. al. (Group 2005)

Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)

• Lave and Wenger (1991)– Example: tailors in West Africa– Start by sweeping floor

• Legitimate: floor needs to be swept• Peripheral: watching activity around them

– When someone finally says “sew this seam,” they’re ready• Seen it over and over

• Real-world learning is often more like this than like school

• Cognitive apprenticeship– Use this approach for knowledge work– Need to make expert practice visible

Knowledge-Building Communities

• Sociology of science (Latour, Woolgar)– Community of scientists

– Publish ideas

– Review others’ ideas critically

– “Truth” emerges from this social process

• Scardamalia and Bereiter– Could a knowledge-building community be

used as a learning environment?

Becoming Wikipedian

• Typical progression:– Start with one edit– Get a watch list– Begin to care about the site as a whole

• LPP in a knowledge-building community

More Field Work

• Interview studies with:– Administrators

• NOT a free-for-all• Complex processes support the evolution of policy• Increasing decentralization

– Leaders of Wikiprojects • Allow local groups to establish editorial guidelines

– Example: WikiProject Medicine» “Medical Collaboration of the Week”

– Helping site to scale gracefully

– People banned from the site • Norms have evolved• Artifacts play a role in community response to deviance

– Example: ‘band’ speedy delete tag– Distributed cognition (see work by Ed Hutchinson)

Science Online: Motivation

• What if we created a version of Wikipedia written by high-school students?– Focus is on science

• PhD work of Andrea Forte

Wiki as a Construction Kit

• Constructing text is a powerful learning activity – Writing-to-learn

• We can design environments that support specific writing activities

• Design challenges

– Support critical citation – media literacy skills

– Make it fit in the classroom

Constructionist Learning at Work

Science Online Results:Affordances of Wikis for Learning• Students perceive user-generated content as valuable

– Feel a responsibility to their readership

– This changes both their writing practices and their motivation to write well

• A real audience can bring about meta-cognitive engagement with content – Students reflect on what readers need to know

• Publishing model is incremental and transparent– Provides for the emergence of new collective writing practices

by making the writing process visible

– Supports cognitive apprenticeship

Collaborative Constructionism

• Constructionist learning can often be individualistic• Truly collaborative projects are happening online

– Example: Flash animations on newgrounds.com– How is this done?– Methods (Luther & Bruckman 2008):

• Screen scraping• Interviews with 14 animators

• Three primary collaborative modes– Narrative– Continuation– Collection

• Different narrative structures lead to different work processes• PhD work of Kurt Luther

Narrative: “Valentine ‘29”

Linear Story Collab

Continuation: “Pass-my-Flash 2”

Continuous Story Collab

Collection: “When Farm Animals Attack”

Nonlinear Story Collab

Task Characteristics

• Development in parallel or series?• Does the final product need all contributions, or can

some be filtered?• Is the project ever “finished”?

– Animation has one final release version

– Contrast to Wikipedia article (continuous release) or open source software (frequent release)

• Is the creative style conventional or innovative?– Convention supports shared expectations

Heavy Demands on Leaders

• Challenges:– Articulate vision– Recruit contributors– Give feedback– Justify decisions– Replace dropouts– Integrate final product– Etc.

New Suite of Tools: Sandbox

• Support existing practice– Reduce burden on leader

• Examples:– Claim system for available tasks– Automatic tracking of who contributed for credits

• Transform existing practices– Reduce role of leader– All tools have multiple settings

• Examples: – Task assignment

» Centralized: Leader assigns task» Decentralized: Anyone can claim task

– Task completion» Centralized: Leader decides» Decentralized: Members vote

– Optional branching structure of final product

Conclusion:Designing for Collaboration• An iterative process:

– Understanding existing practices

– Envisioning new possibilities• Guided by values

– Broad, diverse participation

– Designing tools to support new practices

A Few Questions

• Is Wikipedia one of a kind?– What might another Wikipedia-style project in

another domain look like?

• Will Internet technologies make possible new cultural forms?

• Will collaborative creation lead to a broad reconceptualization of the idea of an “author”?

More Questions

• What is the future relationship between professional and amateur media– In entertainment?– In education?– In journalism?– In other domains?

• What does “amateur” mean, and will this term change in meaning?

Acknowledgments

• Yochai & David• ELC students:

– Betsy DiSalvo, Andrea Forte, Kurt Luther, Sarita Yardi

• ELC sponsors:– IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, Ricoh – The National Science Foundation– US Department of Education

• For more info:– http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/