Just Posting in the Same Place? A Taxonomy of Collaborative Behaviors in U.S. K-12 Wikis

• In Event: Investigations of Wikis for Collaboration and Knowledge Building

Abstract

In this study, we propose a taxonomy of collaborative student behaviors on wikis. Our findings emerge from an analysis of a representative sample of U.S., K-12 wikis drawn from a population of nearly 200,000 wikis. We identify seven types of collaborative moves: concatenation, copyediting, co-construction, commenting, discussion, scheduling, and planning. We find that collaborative behaviors are generally rare, only 11% of K-12 wikis have any observable collaboration, and only 3% of these wikis are highly collaborative. When we compare these findings to classroom time usage studies, we find this limited collaboration may represent an improvement over collaborative opportunities within classrooms. We also compare our findings to collaboration rates in other online communities to illustrate the challenges of online collaboration.

Authors

• Justin Fire Reich, Harvard University

• Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University

• John B. Willett, Harvard University