The wiki as knowledge repository: Using a wiki in a community of practice to strengthen K-12 education

Note: The following article was published in the November/December 2008 issue of TechTrends (Volume 52, Number 6). The publication agreement allows me to publish it on my personal website, so here it is for you to enjoy.

The concept of managing an organization’s knowledge has caught on in recent years (Sallis & Jones, 2002). Dubbed knowledge management, the field has grown as it addresses key characteristics of knowledge, like the concept that knowledge cannot be separated from a knower (Hilsop, 2002; Sallis & Jones, 2002) and the idea that there are two types of knowledge: tacit, which is intangible know-how, and explicit, which is objective and formal knowledge that can be communicated easily (Sallis & Jones, 2002). One of the great challenges of the knowledge management field is sharing tacit knowledge in a way that passes it along to others or even converts it into something like explicit knowledge (Carroll et al., 2003; Santo, 2005).

Sallis and Jones (2002) and Santo (2005) note that education has not been quick to adopt techniques of knowledge management. While addressing the reason is well beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth mentioning that the slow adoption is not for lack of need. With high stakes testing and high pressure for improvement burdening schools-especially those in K-12 public education-educators have a need to use the knowledge that resides in their local communities as strategically as possible. They also have a need to create new knowledge that will launch innovative approaches to their local and specific concerns (Carroll et al., 2003; Coakes & Smith, 2007). Strategic use of knowledge management should ultimately help these schools improve in tangible ways. Santo (2005) suggests that an “accumulation of both explicit and tacit knowledge can contribute to data-driven decision making” and an organization’s effectiveness (p. 45), a characteristic few school administrators would overlook.

Attempting even a small knowledge management effort, however, needs to be an intentional effort. There is no reason to assume that employees will seek to share their knowledge (Hilsop, 2002), particularly teachers, who can be protective of their work (Parr & Ward, 2006). To succeed, an environment conducive to knowledge sharing is a must-a culture of trust where incentives and rewards exist for sharing knowledge instead of hoarding it (Hilsop, 2002; Foon Hew, & Hara, 2007; Parr & Ward, 2006).

Creating such an environment is a difficult task, and implementers of knowledge management must recognize characteristics of knowledge and of the individuals under their influence. If knowledge resides in people, knowledge management cannot be controlled or distributed by a few administrators or executives. An organization’s knowledge is spread throughout the organization, which means when one seeks to harness, distribute, and create knowledge and innovation, one must consider the entire scope of people in the organization-for a school, this means the staff as well as the faculty (Carroll et al., 2003; Santo, 2005).

Teachers share knowledge for various reasons in various contexts. Foon Hew and Hara (2007) found that teachers shared knowledge because they sensed they would gain something from it personally-whether it be a stronger understanding of an idea or a better reputation-and because they felt an obligation to their community-whether the obligation arose from a sense of principle or compassion. Schlager and Fusco (2003) observed that teachers also share this knowledge most often within their specific areas of work, with their immediate colleagues, or in response to the real difficulties of their working day-as opposed to sharing it within special in-services or professional development programs. Such a situation is not surprising when one considers that the very knowledge they are sharing is so intimately tied to the environment where it is used and the manner in which it is used (Hilsop, 2002).
Knowledge management efforts in education should therefore spread their fingers into all parts of the school and its existing organizational boundaries, growing an environment where sharing within the daily routine is encouraged and nurtured.

Communities of Practice

The most obvious strategy for managing knowledge in the educational context would be nurturing communities of practice. Communities of practice, as defined by Wenger (1998 ), are the communities in which there exists “the sustained pursuit of shared enterprise” (p. 45). In these communities, knowledge sharing is actually a by-product of the engagement that regularly exists (Carroll et al., 2003; Wenger, 1998 ). Hilsop (2002) points out that the community of practice attains such a high level of common language and assumptions that sharing knowledge becomes a “relatively straightforward” process (p. 173).

Straightforward maybe, but setting up the context for that exchange is not an easy task. Parr and Ward (2006) observed that a common state in schools is for teachers to engage in only a partial collaboration, where independence is respected so highly that members of a community do not probe deeply into professional issues with one another. Thus, the teacher is generally isolated from colleagues, working in a separate classroom with separate students teaching separate lessons, often totally unaware of what any other teacher is doing (Carroll et al., 2003). Where collaboration does occur, it occurs on a voluntary basis, which at best creates pockets of innovation that do not penetrate beyond the volunteers’ reach (Parr & Ward, 2006). Ironically, all the teachers-not just the pockets of collaborators-are working toward the same goal; but they work essentially separately from one another, creating a dynamic Weick (1976) dubbed “loose coupling” (as cited in Parr & Ward, 2006, p. 783).

The independence and isolation is magnified by the touchy nature of the teaching business. Teaching is a deeply personal pursuit and when one critiques the teacher’s practice, one is critiquing that person (Santo, 2005). Thus, a teacher might not share with colleagues for fear of the vulnerability involved – what they share could be determined not good enough (Parr & Ward, 2006; Foon Hew & Hara, 2007) and admitted weaknesses or observed failures could be used against them by administrators (Carroll et al., 2003).

Despite the obstacles, the community of practice model can work in education for a number of reasons. For one, the bottom-up feel to the creation of knowledge eliminates some of the fear teachers may have when sharing knowledge under the direct observation of an administrator (Carroll et al., 2003; Parr & Ward, 2006; Santo, 2005; Schlager & Fusco, 2003).The bottom-up aspect asserts itself when the community of practice is encouraged to capitalize on social interactions. Social interactions cannot be overlooked. Though commonly dismissed as “water cooler talk,” these exchanges are necessary for building the trust required to express a genuine vulnerability-to admit that one needs new knowledge (Santo, 2005). When opportunities to build trust are supplied, it becomes easier, even for independent-minded teachers, – to submit to the interdependent nature of a community of practice and to adopt a collective responsibility for the actions of the group (Hartnell-Young, 2006; Wagner, 2006). In fact, Hilsop (2002) warns explicitly that if these social factors of knowledge-exchange and communities of practice are ignored, a knowledge management plan is at risk of collapse.

Additionally, the community of practice transfers the acquisition of knowledge to the point of need (Schlager & Fusco, 2003). Tacit knowledge is most often passed along through conversation (Wagner, 2006) and stories of personal experience (Yi, 2006), and these stories tend to surface when the subject is most appropriate-in conversation with those closest to the situation and most trusted by the seeker of knowledge (Hilsop, 2002; Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, 1998; Wagner, 2006). Granger, Morbey, Lotherington, Owston, and Wideman (2002) found this “just in time learning” to be the preferred method of knowledge acquisition for teachers, a finding that meshes well with the propositions of Schlager, Fusco, and Schank (1998 ) and Schlager and Fusco (2003) that teacher professional development is most effective when delivered in the context of practice instead of in separate professional development opportunities. Thus, key characteristics of a community of practice-its root at the point of practice and its dependence upon social interactions-specifically address some of the traditional obstacles of K-12 teachers’ practice.

Why I want no one to say of me, “What is his secret?”

A couple weeks back I set forth a plan for teachers to observe other teachers – a plan I will enact when I am king – and today I found a perfect example of why I need such a thing. A math teacher in our school was featured in on the front page of our local paper (online version not available) and lauded for his tremendous influence upon students. He is amazing, and year after year at a special event our top students choose him as the teacher who has influenced and inspired them the most.

Looking over the article, a few of my fellow English teachers commented how wonderful the article was and how amazing his influence on students has been. Then we admitted that none of us had any solid idea what he did that was so inspirational. This teacher is retiring this year and has taught in our building for 25 years (I think I have the numbers correct) – how have none of us been exposed to his skill?

At the end of the year, he retires, taking with him a wealth of tacit knowledge regarding teaching, our school, and our students. What a shame so many of us are unaware of his methods – methods we may as well call his secrets, since we don’t know them.

That we would be able to ask one another, “What’s his secret?” is a tragedy, if you ask me. That he or I or any teacher’s methods are secret or mysterious in any manner means we as a school are not using the knowledge base we possess in our community of practice. And I will admit here to the world – I could use some of that knowledge. My school isn’t exactly in the top of the class in terms of NCLB report cards. While I have never been one to tell others my grades, I will admit that we’ve never earned the good school discount on our driver’s insurance. We could use all the tips and tacit knowledge there is to offer, especially regarding our particular community and group of students.

To that end, I continue to plug away at the knowledge sharing wiki my department is building. This afternoon I spent my entire planning block (plus some) redesigning a handout that hasn’t worked that well. It’s a guide to inserting quotations into an essay, and it was fine the first time students used it, which was back in September when they wrote their first essay responding to a work of literature. When I taught it then it accompanied a separate presentation and explanation (Power Point), which means I made sense of it for students so they wouldn’t have to read all of it.

But I had wanted them to be able to reuse it later as a reference and building block for when I throw the MLA research paper formatting in their faces, which happens to be now. In that way, it failed – students have balked at all the writing and never actually re-read the content when doing the review exercises I’ve created for them. I can understand their hesitancy, and I therefore attempted to revive it with charts and arrows and purposeful visual stimuli.

Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t, but I’ve made it available to my colleagues through the wiki, and through that page we can work through its success, failure, and even make it better.

Or maybe no one else will look at it, but at least an opportunity is there in case anyone wanted to know any of my “secrets.” The idea is that when I go wherever I go next, whenever I go there, no one will say of me, “I wonder what his secret was?”

Well, they might say that, but the answer should be, “Why don’t you go to the wiki and find out?”

Thanks for reading.

Managing knowledge better than London’s chechaquo builds a fire

And here I sit, thinking about knowledge management again. In a sense, I wouldn’t mind getting onto another topic, but it’s not the topic that is driving me nuts so much as the all-consuming power of earning a degree, working while maintaining some semblance of professionalism, and being a father all at one time. And then there’s those websites I’ve become the “master” of. Oh boy, the things I get myself into. I may be trying to help my department better manage its collective knowledge, but I’m not setting any solid precedents in managing my own life. Last night I stayed up so late working on a project that the little bit of sickness I’d apparently fended off until now bit my throat. Now, seriously – was that project worth it?

We are not indestructible; we are frail creatures, and I find too many parallels between my own decisions and those of Jack London’s prospector in “To Build a Fire“:

Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.

Now I fervently hope I am not a man “without imagination,” but I am awfully thick-headed and prideful at times about my choices, and, as I have proved again, I often act without thought, quickly and alertly like London’s prospector, and also like him, without taking the time to consider significances. Maybe I’m not defined by this nature, but if I do not stop it may become a dominant, though inadvertent, characteristic. One must work to attain and sustain simplicity and focus.

Did I say I was thinking about knowledge management? I’m convinced this is part of the theme. What if a department’s collective personality is like mine? They take on various projects and work extremely hard, but rarely stop to consider what was done and whether the things that were done were the best things to be done. Stopping and considering falls into the world of knowledge management, and I have a hope that if teachers use the KM wiki I’ve set up, the contributor will benefit from the sharing of resources in significant ways. Those ways won’t be the same as the consumer of the lesson plan or activity in question, but they could be valuable moments of reflection and consideration.

Take this example scenario: An activity I do with my students – say these stories my juniors just wrote following our reading of Jack London – strikes me as worthwhile and I figure other teachers might like to know about it. I head to the KM repository/wiki to add it to the growing supply.

To add it, I click “New Page” on the wiki and then when prompted, select a template available on the wiki that is made specially for sharing activities. It prompts me to design the page in a certain way, to answer a series of questions about the activity so another teacher can decide whether the context is repeatable for her classroom. The lesson and activity description, while necessary for teachers to know, is actually only a fraction of what is shared. When confronted with the template, I can erase any categories I do not wish to use, but the existence of the template encourages me to attempt at least short answers to most of the categories:

• Quick Description
• Goals
• Original Context
• Time
• Good Parts
• You Should Know (essentially, bad parts)
• Rundown (this is where the actual plan part goes)
• Materials

I post the lesson, tag it with relevant terms, like “American Literature,” “Creative Writing,” or “Stories,” save it, and stick a link on the front page so folks know I’ve added something new.

My claim is that the process in which I engaged benefits me, even if I don’t bother to look around the wiki to see what others have contributed. By answering the questions about the context, I have had to articulate what the good parts and bad parts of the activity were, as well as revisit in my own terms what my goals were in creating that activity.

By the way, when I say goals, I do NOT mean those horrid lists of state standards. At this level of sharing, those communicate nothing necessary between veteran teachers. When I look at another teacher’s goals, I want to see what they were thinking when they made the lesson: “To write an essay that was so easy we could focus on the writing instead of the thinking” or “To cap the unit with something half fun since I’d just slaughtered them with the unit test.” In seeing those kinds of goals, I am taken as close as I can be taken to the point of creation, so I can see the motives behind decisions that were made about the lesson. If my goals are then different, it is easier for me to make adjustments when I choose to make the lesson my own.

That imitation of presence and capture of classroom experience is very much what I aspire to create – though I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. I say in my welcome message to the wiki that when I worked as a furniture delivery guy, I learned half of my skills by watching people who were better at the job than me. The other half I learned by breaking things and then not doing it again. Teachers get to break things, but they don’t get to watch each other, so by working in the education industry, I’ve lost a crucial area of learning.

That’s a big deal, and I think it’s crucial to recover it somehow. If we’re to learn anything, to pick up any innovations that might be diffusing through our culture, as Everet Rogers might say, we’ll need to experience more of that modeled practice. Rogers asserts that “diffusion is fundamentally a social process” and that

the heart of the diffusion process consists of interpersonal network exchanges and social modeling between those individuals who have already adopted an innovation and those who are then influenced to do so. (34)

That “innovation” could be something as simple as a way of announcing assignments to students so no one misses anything, or it could be a neat activity or lesson that got students motivated. Without the modeling though, we as teachers lose a key piece of the communication exchange that leads to diffusion, or learning.

Oh, the perils of the “system” in our school system. But, then again, as this little blip I caught from Megan Husted points out, perhaps the rest of the world is breaking down to the teachers’ sorry levels where modeling is not present:

That we’ve transferred a lot of office business to e-mail — well, who cares?

I didn’t, until I thought back to my own early days in an office, at Vintage Books, eight years ago. The phones trilled continuously, and you could hear the springs in an assistant’s chair as she popped up to announce who was on Line 2. All the noise seemed to add energy and urgency to the day.

And I can’t imagine how a young employee learning the ropes can acquire what she needs to know, as speedily, without the advantage of eavesdropping on her boss’s phone conversations.

How can anyone get a grasp of an industry’s pertinent relationships or decision-making time frames, let alone the fragility of a particular office’s egos, if there are so few chances to hear these people talking to the outside world? The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge. (Thanks to Alan Jacob’s Tumblr for the find.)

Perhaps the world’s new struggle is why there’s so much research in this field of knowledge management. The world too needs an idea for replacing the traditional modeling experience. Perhaps the explosion of the wiki is part of that trend. Probably not, I suppose, but I do hope this little KM wiki will be a piece that at least makes up slightly for the lack of modeling. And in the process, it may benefit the teacher who models.

Sometimes when I do calm down from all the ridiculous projects I take on, I project beyond grad school and think of how I want to structure my life: peaceful, well-rested time with my wife and girls, time to read something I like, non-academic writing, occasional exercise, and even some recreational photography. That’s a vision I can get excited about, and as I try to help my department, I hope my colleagues and I can catch a vision of something better for ourselves, something where we are working together, more calmly, and better.

But if we’re going to do that, we’ve got to be smarter than London’s prospector. I’d rather not end up like him.

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.

Copyright Mr. Sheehy at A Teacher’s Writes

Making a Photo Story tutorial and a knowledge repository, I rethought the struture of the web

I tried to log some hours today on my knowledge management project, and it was a little weird. You see, we had a professional day today and I chose to work on my project the entire time – it’s professional development, after all, and then I can etch all the time on my internship log. What it meant, though, was that I didn’t really want the time to go slowly, like I often do on these professional work days. These are days where we can work on long term planning and development for a large portion of the day, and I naturally hope to accomplish a ton. This time, though, I was less concerned with making large strides and more concerned with jumping up a few hours on my project. So my thinking looks more like this: let’s get this over with so I can go home and hang out with my girls. It’s shameless, I realize, but it’s Friday, and it’s the truth.

Anyway, I thought I’d share some of the little pieces of my work during this stretch.

For one, I assembled a tutorial on using Photo Story 3 in the classroom. It’s not difficult software to use and most folks could sniff out how to use it, but I tend to think a tutorial page like this makes some of my colleagues more daring when it comes to using something new. They feel like there is some help available, or it makes it so when they start out exploring it, they have a bit of background knowledge to help them work through it (there’s that schemata thing again).

The odd thing about that tutorial page, too, is that I have now posted it in three places on the web, so it can reach three distinct audiences.

• My department’s wiki – that knowledge repository I’m creating
• My personal Web Tools for Teaching wiki – where I put tutorials and other help on web tools. I use this for a professional development course I teach during the summers and as a general reference/repository of tutorials and lessons I’ve created for using technology in education.
• A technology leaders’ wiki – another type of knowledge repository I’d like to launch simultaneously with the department wiki I’m creating. This one would be used by a group of teachers from around the school district who serve in the capacity of “technology leaders.”

I would like to have this created only one time, but if I make it only once and link people to that one page, they’re more likely to get disoriented and lost as they meander about the Web. With one click, teachers from my department would lose all those sidebar links and consistent visual stimuli that help them navigate through the department wiki. It’s like what I need is a kind of site that operates like a frames based web page, where the main box bounces all over the web, but the box on the left and the top remain in the same location, retaining the original navigation of interest.

Wouldn’t that be cool though? You could have every website log information in the header of the html that dictated the most important navigation – the top bar, top level navigation, so to speak. And in my browser I could choose an option that displayed that navigation in a type of sidebar. Then I could click at will all over the web, following the hyper content where e’r it leads, all the time remaining rooted in the site where I ultimately want to be. You kind of have this effect with Wikipedia, but that’s just because the content of Wikipedia is so astoundingly large. It’s unrealistic to think that the web as a whole – those small pieces loosely joined, as Alan Levine has called it – could be so uniformly organized as a site like Wikipedia. But if we had a different way of coding it or displaying it, we might be able to join the pieces better, right? That’s ultimately what I’d like – a smoother joining of the various pieces, so there would be less need to repeat content because viewers wouldn’t need to spend so much time orienting themselves to new pages. Call it extreme mashup. Or something.

(Side note: when I re-read the above part of the article a couple hours later, I thought to myself, “That’s what tabs and multiple windows are for, and why you can code your links to open in another browser window. You haven’t thought of anything helpful at all here – just a way to confuse the cluttered screen a little more.” So I haven’t really rethought the web so much as stated something someone else thought about 20 years ago. That’s my kind of thinking.)

For two (maybe what is above here is more than one, but I consider all that talk about the tutorial I created to be one, kind of like I consider questions with parts A, B, and C to be only one, despite my students’ protests), I wrote a letter to my colleagues and included what I wanted to be a small statement of justification for why I was launching the knowledge repository web site (I don’t use the term “repository” when trying to pitch the project). It accidentally turned into more than a short statement, and I probably lost my audience by drawing it on too long. Oops. I’ll stick it here for the sake of repetition and historical reference, as well as a follow-up to my recent tirade against working with colleagues.

Ha – I just spoke of my own work as being worthy of historical reference. It makes it sound important, doesn’t it? I shouldn’t have to mention that I happen be the historian that might reference it, but I will to make sure no one thinks I think too highly of my own stream of thinking.

In terms of explanation, or to sell you on the need for the project, I will say just this. I believe we have in this department a fairly constructive and well-functioning community of practice, but being educators, we work in isolation – we’re “loosely coupled” pockets of independent workers who get to interact on occasion but rarely have the opportunity (or often the desire) to collaborate deeply.

We also work in a highly politicized industry with a fantastically large bureaucracy, where top-down initiatives generally drive us crazy and accomplish little besides adding arbitrary items to our to-do lists. I am not one to put faith in the top-down process, and in that way I do not think there is much merit in trying to obtain slots for true collaboration during our professional time, like in-services.

Instead, I am a believer that we can make our own professional lives better from the bottom, by taking care of ourselves without too much worry for what the top thinks. What I am doing with this project is attempting to create a location on the web where we as fellow professionals can intersect during the moments when we need to intersect. I want this website to be a place where I can go for ideas from local colleagues who are part of the same environment as me. That is, I want resources and ideas from people who teach the same standards I teach to the same students I teach, while using the same resources, and I want these ideas to be available at the point of creation – the point where I choose to create a lesson or activity, whether it be during my planning time, or during my class, or when the custodian is the only person left in the building to respond to my verbal exclamations.
The site will not work unless folks are willing to use it during their regular time, but I’m hoping the idea is good enough that we’ll be willing to do that. I think if we are willing to give to the communal pot with this, we’ll each get in return more than we put in.

That said, I think getting started can be tough, and so I’ve gone after the grant money so we receive a little compensation for making the effort to launch this resource. Twenty dollars an hour won’t change anyone’s budget, but it doesn’t seem bad when you can get it and still be home by 5:00pm.

I look forward to seeing how all of you can help me improve my teaching.

That’s my schpeal and my day. Interestingly, I’ve had this article up almost all afternoon, and piecing it together has ended up becoming my task for the day. It served as a sort of glue or unifying factor to my afternoon, keeping me somewhere near the topic where I needed to be – kind of like that concept of web design I was discussing. But easier.

Blogs are good, and you’ve made it to the bottom of this article. I’ll leave you with this little image, which I’m declaring possibly the greatest picture I’ve ever taken.

Thanks for reading.

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• Original image: ‘veritum dies aperit‘ by: John Harvey
• Original image: ‘balconies and brollies‘ by: Owen Benson
• Original image: ‘Tad not drinking wine‘ by: Eddie Codel
• Original image: ‘Weathered Sunset‘