Here I briefly go over my reflections of the feedback I have gathered from the semi structured interviews.
Note that in doing this project, I have learned that a wiki is inherently an action research project in itself; it’s action in the form of a plan, that’s reflected on by an observation, over and over. An imperical study on how the wiki impacts student learning would be a great thing to have as a research project, and one my managers would warmly welcome as part of our ongoing research at the institute.
Current Usage, Content & Student Engagement
At present the students when they learn about the wiki they generally come at it because one of the technicians has pointed them to it, and the students are surprised to find it. This is not for the lack of telling the students however- it’s mentioned in the Big Welcome, at the beginning of every new module from the CCI, it’s linked to the common communication platform we use called Slack, it’s on the Moodle for every module, it’s on posters around the CII classrooms and is reintroduced at every Physcial Computing class. Somehow, until the student needs the information on the wiki, they don’t get to it until someone points it out for their particular need.
The wiki holds information about every piece of technology the students can load for their projects, it’s location and how many are avilable- this is a really useful piece of live information available on campus for when they want to start building their Pyshical Computing projects, of which we have some 400 students doing over the academic year. Also held on the wiki, and the main reason for its existence is how to use a lot of this equipment.
As CCI grew, so did the wiki, and now it content centers mainly around the technical team and their support activities to enable the students to carry out their studies with the latest technology at hand.
The Technical Team
The tech team are mainly the ones updating the content, and the updates, new articles and updated information usually stem from a student support one-to-one where we have had to go through step-by-step how to achieve a technical solution to something. This could be anything from connecting a touch sensor to a jumper and a computer, to send data to turn lights on and off. Once we are done with the technical support session, we then SHOULD update the wiki with what we’ve learned together ready for another student (or technician) to refer to in the future. I say should, but the reality is that we have a queue of students more or less every day who are asking for support, along with a whole host of other tasks in our job descriptions, so updating the wiki has become a bit of an ad-hock activity and usually happens when something was particularly complex, or that we have had to go through the method so many times that it saves time for everyone to have a wiki article about it. There’s one other important element too, as technical support staff we get our own dopamine hits from solving these problems, and sometimes we are simply too exhausted to go through it all again to document what we have done.
Students generally simply want to get from A to B and the articles are written very much with this in mind, however if we were more aligned with the subject material that was being taught in classrooms, we may have a more harmogimnous integration with wiki. For example If academics teaching technical subjects (many use the same ideas taught slightly differently) came together to agree on a common way of doing a particular technical thing, then they could share the updating of the wiki and every student would have a better experience as it wouldn’t be just one lecturer’s idea, but a group of them with different flare to each concept, although the technical details are more or less the same.
Academic use
Academics barely touch the wiki, although recently there has been some academic content added. The academics currently don’t really know much about it and see it as a very tech-team thing. Perhaps we as technicians need to reach out to the academics and tell them about how useful this resource can be for their teaching, although having too many people editing the wiki might lead to disputes about it’s use, so I suggest we have a meeting to decide exactly what the wiki is, and who it’s authors should be. Should this include students in sections, for example? In essence if a subject area had more editors and content creators, then the subject material would automatically become richer and more valuable for all. Although arguably this may have a detrimental value to its very accessibility for the students.
Academic staff do now also have a private ‘Staff Only’ area for some details aboue specific equipment use.
Content Relevance and Accuracy
When I started my role at CCI I was the first technician aside from the technical manager (who set up the wiki in his previous role at LCC based on the fact that students needed the support) I recognised that as a small team I wanted to know everything I could about the technical aspects were of every course, what the course was teaching and what resources it would require outside and with it. This is apparently not how a usual techician in these roles behaves, but in the building of a successful institute, I believed it was my duty to understand all aspects to make the most of my role. Because of this I was able to absorb what the CCI required as teaching support and I updated the resources, including the wiki as appropriate.
Now the team is bigger, perhaps we need to integrate more with the needs of the courses or maybe we operate better as a tech team not connected to them, seeing everything from the student perspective and not the academics.
The academics have seen the power of the wiki and through this action research project, discovered that they see it as a different sort of language, something like a ‘maker-language’, separate to the language they use in their lectures.
Some of the information on the wiki is out of date. There is a whole section on fabrication that needs revising and very little about the newly acquired equipment in the dark lab, yet the robotics and physical computing areas have been revised often. Again, there are many reasons for this, as mentioned above, the main one being the queue of students needing all the technician’s time.
I suggest we have a monthly ‘wiki-time’ meeting as the tech team and see how we can help eachtother flesh out some content that is missing or update what’s there together.
Improvements, Features & The Future
The main thing we need to agree on as a team is how we will use the wiki going forward. I suggest we have an afternoon across the department to think about this together, where the technical team can advise the academics how they might want to further implement the wiki in the overall pedioogiy of the teaching at CCI as so many things are repeated and we have so much talent in house to share the best ways of conveying how to make articles releivent to students development. Academics can have more ownership of the content on the wiki should they choose, and it may be very beneficial for them too.
Accessibility and Inclusion
There’s always talk about how we might improve Accessibility and Inclusion as these are at the core of everything we do at UAL, but there are considerations we need to make. Using videos for example is a great resource, but very time-consuming to make, so it would come at the cost of other services we offer in our daily activities. One solution I used for this, was recording my lecture where I was going over something technical, such as soldering, and adding that into the wiki as an extra option for support. There are other considerations to be made also, such as the safety of our kit- the wiki is public, and having a video of us setting up really expensive equipment and showing the world where and how it’s kept is an obvious security issue. At the end of the day, text is king, it’s easily translated and put through a multitude of accessibility equipment such as screen readers of voice synthesisers, it’s why the WC3 standards exist the way they do. As technologies improve, I’m growing more certain that with text any GPT-AI system would be able to interpret the information however the recipient would like to have it.
A redesign of the wiki where we develop it with a pedagogical or empathy north star being a student feeling safe and that they belong in the CCI would be an amazing goal, yet the wiki is just one way of learning things among many, many others, and most people will be working in groups or alongside technicians anyway, with many lecturers around them, so they can access what they need in whatever way is appropriate for them.
As for our Social Justice contribution from the wiki, it’s been suggested that we highlight projects on the wiki that show how questions and projects related to social, climate or racial justice issues have been addressed or become part a larger dialogue due to the nature of being able to use the equipment or technology as intructed on the wiki, and if possible, ask if the student would like to link their work to the wiki for student inspiration to continue this dialouge in practice by borrowing kit and making work.
The platform
Choosing a platform is difficult to host information such as a wiki does. The platform we use is sort of the best of a bad set of off-the-shelf options on offer for our specific needs, as we don’t have our own software development team to build such a platform, we are going with a solution that integrates as much as possible with our existing solutions for everything else, and it’s very simplistic, and has its own quirks and bells and whistles etc.
Other Improvements
There are a number of different ways to loan equipment and the wiki could host more information about how to use this equipment, that could be directly linked to from QR codes printed and stuck on to this equipment.
There is the possibility to consider a deeper integration with the existing communication system we use, Slack and a possible GPT trained bot we could research and build as a tech-team project, where the system learns itself from how our technicians help students and suggests similar or better solutions as we train it. This would be a great research project for a masters student perhaps. Or even maybe a full- action research project for the PGCert MA?
