Focus groups
As part of my research into student experiences of wikis and podcasts, I spoke to a couple of focus groups made up of, Edinburgh University students, about their experiences and attitudes.
The wiki focus group were asked about what would encourage, or discourage them from using wikis. The responses were as follows:
What would encourage you to use a wiki?
- easy to find
- easy to use
- searchability of content
- usefulness, reliability and sufficiency of content
- regular maintenance and keeping up to date of content
What would put you off using a wiki?
- difficult to find (eg. buried deep withiin a MyED channel)
- difficultly with getting straight to the information you need
- too much information
- unreliable or abusive content
- too much effort to maintain (from moderator's point of view)
So what can we take from this for the Digital Cre8or wiki design project. The obvious questions we need to be able to answer would seem to be:
- How do we make the DC wiki easy to find and easy to use? Is MyED really a problem, or is it possible that this group is untypically biased against it?
- Are we satisfied that students will be able to find the content the need easlily?
- How do we define which information is relevant and which is not and how do we get that across to the community?
- What should be our mechanism for controlling the content? Should an administrator be moderating it or should we allow the community to moderate itself? Are we less exposed to abuse because we are a private wiki with access controlled by registration, than we might be if we were open to the world?
- How do we ensure content is up to date? Is this perhaps more likely to be a problem once the course has been around for a while, rather than while it is new.
- How will we know that our wiki users are satisfied with the experience of using it?
Can you suggest answers to these questions? Great - let's hear them. Are there other related issues that you are aware of? Let's hear what you think.
I would suggest putting the Wiki on MyEd as the majority of our users are familiar with this portal and are used to searching and registering for content on it.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of moderation, I think we should aim to allow the community to self-moderate it as much as possible. I do think that a private Wiki such as this one would be less exposed to abuse, particularly since the users would probably be aware of just how easy it would be to trace anyone posting abusive content.
In order to get user's feedback I think we need something in place that will allow users to leave their feedback anonymously. I am not sure how you achieve this on a Wiki but perhaps some form of questionnaire (either on the Wiki or a website elsewhere) would provide us with useful feedback.
We could probably have the wiki available either through MyEd or directly via the url, giving users the choice of how to connect with the it.
ReplyDeleteI am inclined to think that putting our wiki within WebCT, within MyEd would not be helpful, which I think is part of the point being made in the focus group, when they talk about information being buried deep within MyEd.
I totally agree with George about self-moderation, and that the risk of our wiki being abused is small, if it is kept private with registration required.
I think we could set up a BOS questionnaire somewhere within the wiki to provide us with anonymous feedback (any ideas where?).
Maybe we could post an anonymous questionnaire at regular intervals throughout the pilot to monitor if any modifications we make based on feedback are having the desired effect.
ReplyDelete