Recent developments

By Ona Sumner | Published: December 9, 2010

The OurWikiBooks team has had a busy couple of weeks, with exciting developments on both the practical and research sides of the project.

Last week saw an information and training session for new student volunteers.  The student volunteers had a range of experience levels with wikis, so some introductory training was offered before students had a chance to use the system.  Volunteers are encouraged to use their userpages as sandboxes for experimenting with wiki formatting to gain familiarity with the system, but some of our volunteers also took further steps and began looking at content and editing pages in some of the ‘books’.  The session prompted some great discussion, with student’s looking critically at existing content and working collaboratively to improve it.

The student’s also provided interesting feedback about various areas of the project, including their experiences of A-Level Computing and ICT, the challenges of studying Computer Science at degree level, and areas of interest that they’d like to see represented in the wiki.  Several students mentioned interest in mobile computing, so we’ll be looking into how this theme could be tied into the wiki in future meetings.

Pupil’s from St Ambrose also had their first experiments using the wiki, with pupils getting to grips with the software and structure before beginning to develop a structured book, with content already produced on systems software, DNS servers and packets.   This content should continue to grow organically as pupils continue to use the wiki with input from teachers, external pupils and student volunteers.

The team is also continuing to work on the research side of the project.  Pupils from Altrincham Grammar School have recently been interviewed on their thoughts about computing as a subject, their current use and understanding of wikis, and the project and what they hope to gain from it.  We hope to conduct interviews with pupils from the other participating schools in the next few weeks before the end of term, which will form the base-line for the next stages of the research.

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Upcoming volunteers meeting

By Ona Sumner | Published: November 29, 2010

As the project gains momentum, the work of our student volunteers is becoming increasingly important.  Students studying Computer Science at degree level offer a unique insight into the project, having recent experience of both the A-Level curriculum and the transition into studying at HE level.   We hope that as school pupils begin to utilise the Wiki, the input of student volunteers will prove valuable in both shaping content and keeping the impetus going.

On Wednesday 1st December, we’ll be hosting an information session for prospective volunteers to encourage more students to become involved in the project.  Volunteers will have a chance to find out more about the project and its aims and discuss whether they’d like to get involved in content creation, support, or work in schools.  They will also have the opportunity to explore the Wiki itself, and have a go at content creation and using wiki formatting

The different types of volunteering all offer students a great chance to contribute to the community within Greater Manchester, and to add value to their CVs.  Students interested in attending an information session should email Ona Sumner at ona@cs.man.ac.uk.

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Agile project planning

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: November 16, 2010

To date the ourWikiBooks team has participating in several important processes that pertain to our project work:  Training computing teachers who, together with their students, are going to participate in the ourWikiBooks Project, getting our team CRB checked, shepherding our plans through the rigours of  the University of Manchester’s ethical approval processes, visiting schools, gaining consent forms from school pupils’ parents, and interviewing groups of students to baseline attitudes before they engage in our project activities.

But most of all, we have been keenly awaiting the recent commencement of the new academic year and one of the core activities of the project; school pupils generating wiki content on computing topics relevant to their GCSE and A-level Computing studies.  We have now reached this stage, and we look forward to growing contributions in our wiki, content from which we hope to spin out a pupil-generated textbook. Also to add to this pupil-centric activity, we have a small cadre of our own School of Computer Science students who are generating their own content.

With these new activities we thought it good to hold a planning meeting to orient our team to the different activities that we are undertaking in the rest of the project, and to, in the best agile fashion, ensure that, with new knowledge, we still have a fully optimal plan to realise out three-fold goals: To spin off at least one book from the wiki contents closer to the end of the project, to evaluate the quality and suitability of that book against existing text books, and to gain research results to inform further work in the area by ourselves and others.

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Obtaining ethical approval for ourWikiBooks research interviews

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 5, 2010

ourWikiBooks is not just about school students collaborating in constructing their own personally meaningful textbooks in the context of their A-level studies, guided by teachers and with assistance from University of Manchester students and staff. We are also vitally concerned with the effects of this process on students’ learning processes and their learning ‘maturity’ as indicated by feelings of self-efficacy, and processes of self-regulated and self-directed learning.

As such we need to find out how students engage in the process of textbook construction as part of their class activities, and how the co-construction of textbook material affects student learning processes. The project is therefore contains three stages of of interviews and questionnaires that will inform our research:

  • Initial interviews when the new school year starts will provide baseline information about school student attitudes to wikis and the construction of their own learning resources. These will be group interviews (a la focus groups) backed by by individual questionnaires that look at learning maturity.
  • Mid-research interviews will be used to inform and guide our later research with students.
  • Final interviews will be preceded by a detailed examination of wiki history to see who contributed what and when. This information will be used in discussing the student’s work and attitudes in one-to-one interviews.

Needless to say, in dealing with students under 18 we have to meet two criteria. CRB checks are straightforward. Gaining ethical approval from the University Research Ethics Committee is considerably more complex, being somewhat comparable to the process of writing our original bid for funding. However, this process has been beneficial in that it has made the whole team to revisit and think deeply about just how we are going to go about our research activities, what we are going to qualitatively assess and quantitatively measure at different stages, and where, when and how we might deviate within the approved procedures depending on our interim research results. Of course, if we find that our research leads us into significantly new areas we may well be submitting changed plans to the ethics committee.

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Manchester Leadership Programme and OWB

By mandi | Published: August 13, 2010

Last week we met with the organisers of the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP). This is a module that predominantly second year UG students can take that is popular for the work experience it provides. As part of the module, students must complete some volunteer work – they are awarded bronze, silver or gold depending on whether they complete 20, 40 or 60 hours of volunteering.

Increasingly students want volunteer opportunities that relate to their degree and the MLP team feel our project gives great options for Computer Science and possibly other EPS students. They will have a choice of 3 possible methods of involvement in the OurWikiBooks project and they can be flexible in combining these: going into schools to support teachers and pupils in using the wiki technology; developing online materials to be included in the wiki; providing online support for pupils and teachers working on the project.

Last year there were 30 students from CS on this module and it is anticipated that there will be more this year. We will know numbers once module selection has taken place at the beginning of October, just in time for the schools half term.

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ourWikiBooks startup

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 14, 2010

Our ourWikiBooks project is up and running, and the last week has seen our first teacher workshop and a steering group meeting.

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