Cormac’s blog

I have to say, I’ve been feeling an almost constant sense of uncertainty about the direction, scope, and execution of my research project. I have been discussing the research overall in depth and in specifics with both my supervisors, Drew and Andy, who have both given incisive feedback and advice for reading. But, when it comes to actually getting down to it, I feel like I’m making very little progress - both as an individual, and as a community, in the sense that this research is inherently a collaborative effort.

I have attempted to get my research going - on the Wikiversity page “Developing Wikiversity through action research” - and it initially got some really interesting and useful discussion going. But since then, whether due to a lack of clarity in setting up the project’s scope, or perhaps a negative comment by myself, the discussion has come to a halt, and there doesn’t seem to be any movement in any discernible direction from it. I don’t mean to sound entirely negative in my analysis - wiki pages often undergo spurts and lulls of activity and participants - but I’m simply expressing my inner thoughts on this blog - which hasn’t really been the most productive space either.

However, there have been a number of upshots, offshoots, and/or links from this project page:

* Wikiversity as narrative - a fork of some of the discussion page of my/our research project. Two people I greatly respect, Executivezen and Mystictim, and who ask deep, searching questions, began discussing the idea of “wikis as literature” - looking at the way language, truth, wikis and texts interplay, and influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida.

* Collaboratively building concepts - somewhat related to the above, this project deals with the nature of concepts, how they’re formed (socially), how common understandings of concepts can be achieved (or how this is challenged, or even impossible)

* The creation of a questionnaire, and applying it to active Wikiversity participants to see what they want out of the project - in order to identify where or how we might want to ‘intervene’ in an action research context.

* Possibly related to this - there’s a suggested project in addressing how we can manage to retain visitors to the site who might not know what Wikiversity is all about, and to support them to become active participants

* Developing a focus group (or some sort of research group) with teachers in Otago Polytechnic - where Leigh Blackall is working - in order to ascertain what teachers need from a space like Wikiversity, and how Wikiversity might become more useful for them

* The use of wikis for language learning, and the utility of textbooks on Wikibooks for Wikiversity participants (though I’m unsure as of yet if this is to be considered as an action research project).

Yeah, hmm - actually, I just may have written myself into a better mood about this project! There’s quite obviously plenty of fascinating ideas above - and that’s only been from less than ten participants overall so far. In fact, in gathering together the links for these pages (and in actually writing this blog post over the course of most of a day!), I have re-read sections of discussion that I had let go stale in my mind (there are new developments daily on a wiki, and it is easy to lose track or momentum of an idea) and I acknowledge that there is plenty to be getting on with. And what a range of projects even at this stage! I suppose Mystictim is dead right when he says that this project is too big to be undertaken as one great monolithic study - but rather it should be allowed to splinter into different projects. Part of my job, I suppose (along with any others who are interested in moving this project along), will be to ensure that the learning(s) from these projects are shared at some point(s) in time - in order to ensure that we’re discussing, planning, acting, observing, and reflecting in conjunction with other people who are all working under this umbrella initiative (if I can call it that - or perhaps I’m being too greedy in ‘claiming’ any project about developing or learning about Wikiversity for this one?). But I would like to develop a picture of how all this is to be done - before I can probably start to really feel confident about actually going, nevermind getting somewhere. I’ve a meeting with both supervisors coming up on Wednesday - I may start to prompt things forward in the meantime - or I may wait until I have some more concrete ideas in mind. But the main thing is that I think I need to give this project another injection of energy - I think my uncertainty I alluded to itself stems from a lack of action, as well as vice versa - so, in order to get a better understanding of this project, it’s simply a case of getting stuck in, and on our way.