Thinkubator: Wiki as CMS/LMS

Session Title: Thinkubator: Wiki as CMS/LMS

Presenter: John W. Maxwell, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

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Time & Date: 3:30 P.M. - 4:15 P.M., Thursday, August 13, 2009

Location: Rm. C180

Session Description: Thinkubator is the name of a wiki-based experiment in educational technology. Beginning in 2003, we began using wikis to support SFU’s Masters program in Publishing. The first application was for project documentation, but over the next few years our wiki environment came to contain everything: course syllabi and resources, lecture notes, student papers, peer-review, ongoing discussion, blogs, collaborative news source, promotional website content, even graduate thesis writing. The remarkable adaptability of the wiki led to the question: what can’t you do with a wiki? To what extent can more traditional CMS/LMS be replaced by this much simpler and, it turns out, more malleable technology?

But beyond the instrumental quality of adaptability, the lasting virtue of wikis is openness. I argue that this is operative on at least three levels: open-source software for the platform, open data formats for the content, and, most importantly, open architecture. Open architecture refers to the protean ability of wikis to be shaped ongoingly by learners, rather than being the rigid embodiment of a pre-conceived design for interaction and use. This turns out to have considerable pedagogical and political importance; not just through the object lesson of utilizing an open system, but in truly opening up to varieties of learner engagement and modes of interconnection with the rest of the world.

A working wiki is the textual embodiment of a community of inquiry. It is a community’s ongoing representation of itself, a collective autoethnography continually revised and re-created by its members. It gathers size, interlinkage, and layers of reflective exegesis over time. Perhaps as a result, we have never missed having more robust security. Instead, the system simply adapts to or incorporates the social/cultural norms of intellectual trust that undergirds any serious educational environment.

Fundamentally wiki succeeds because of simplicity. As an environment almost without “features”, its core dynamics operate on an editorial level?through writing, rewriting and linking?rather than a ’system administration’ level. As a result, only in wiki do we really see the reins of development handed over to educators and learners themselves.

This paper traces these themes through the example(s) of Thinkubator over the past six years.