1. Part time / distance tutors'
PROWE
Part time / distance tutors'
use of wiki and blogs
to support CPD
Anne Gambles
PROWE Project Manager
The Open University
(personal repositories online wiki environment) OU Library Services in partnership with the UoL BDRA.
Two-year project, beginning in early June 2005, and ending in late July 2007.
[OU
Distance only institution
180K distance students
25K outside the UK
7K associate instructors
Has used First Class conferencing for over 10 years and is implementing Moodle
UoL
mixed mode institution
Around 19K students
Over 7K distance students
350 associate instructors mainly distance-learning tutors, but some tutor on both full and part-time courses.
Blackboard]
whilst very different in constitution, both are large scale providers of distance education and together offer a variety of contexts

2. Central Research Question
"In what ways could wiki and wiki-type environments be useful and useable as personal and informal repositories to support professional development within part-time tutor communities of practice?"
The project’s main aim was to investigate the extent to which informal repositories within wiki and blogs could meet the professional development needs of part-time tutors for sharing and storing resources.
We developed a central research question.
To address this question we set out to identify the most appropriate tools for the tutors by using a set of criteria developed with them.  To test the transferability of lessons learned from the project, both the criteria and the tools were tested across two institutions, each presented significantly different contexts of use.  We used focus groups and questionnaire surveys to identify tutors’ requirements.
The two contexts at OU and UoL, share common issues, but are very different in terms of their tutor population and therefore their needs. Each partner focused on a tool suitable for their specific environment rather than sharing a joint tool. Both the OU and UoL implemented open source wiki and blog tools. The tools chosen were Elgg[1] and PmWiki[2] at the OU and Plone[3] and Zwiki at University of Leicester.
[1] Elgg
[2] PmWiki
[3] Plone

3. PROWE ‘Repository Ecology’
Takes a baseline from Nardi and O’Day1, and incorporates the idea of “actant” from Actor Network Theory.
1 Nardi and O’Day (1999) First Monday 4 (5)
The analysis of tutors’ requirements, the results from later evaluations of their use of the tools, and our experience of providing wiki and blogs to support part-time tutors’ CPD all input to the development of the PROWE ‘Repository Ecology’ and the set of ’How To”/Questions to Ask’, guides. The Ecology and the Guides provide an integrated ecological approach to guiding development of wiki and blog based systems to support part-time tutors (and other remote portfolio workers)
professional development needs. They are available from the PROWE website.
The PROWE Ecology takes a baseline from Nardi and O’Day, and incorporates the idea of “actant” from Actor Network Theory [– thus allowing for an understanding of agency on the part of otherwise "inanimate” elements involved in the operation of the environment.]
We have developed a 3-d representation of the PROWE Ecology, the PROWE visualisation v1.0. This model presents the high-level elements (tutors, content, system, institution) and the drivers and keystone behaviours for each of them. The intersection points between the high-level elements are also illustrated.
The intersection points between the highest level system elements within the ecology have inspired the production of six ‘“How To”/Questions to ask’, guides.

4. ‘“How To”/Questions to ask’ Guides
1. Barriers and enablers to system uptake or use
2. The Institutional Perspective
3. The Knowledge Perspective
4. The Users’ Perspective: Part One – relations with the
institution
5. The Users’ Perspective: Part Two – technology issues
6. The Users’ Perspective: Part Three – content and
collaboration
The ‘“How To”/Questions to Ask’ guides include the questions arising from the intersection points (taking into account the role and position-conflict issues). It is intended that the responses to the questions will help all potential users, institutions etc. pinpoint the potential, or actual, keystone species within any system and that this will allow new system implementers, designers or potential users to understand and plan for possible conflicts of interest so that they can ensure system sustainability.

5. Tutors’ Personal Resource Management Strategies
Diverse
Often accidental
Can be imposed
Seldom logical, sensible or sustainable
Deeply embedded
New strategies/systems need to be transparent and robust
Tutors PRMStrategies.
Tutors are diverse in their backgrounds/subject areas/technology awareness and it literacy. Tutors Personal Resource Management Strategies (PRMS) are as diverse as they are. Often PRMS are accidental or inadvertently imposed on the individual from outside. They are seldom logical, sensible or effectively sustainable but they may also be deeply embedded and keenly defended!
Highly personal and individual, many strategies have arisen in response to experience rather than deliberate strategy. For example, employers have imposed certain practices e.g. some OU tutors have to send tutorial handouts back to Regional Office as requested but one tutor commented that they don’t know what happens to them there. Another tutor places all materials on a "teaching drive" at one of her workplaces because "that's how we do it".
Past misadventures can also be influential experiences – and they can have an influence well out of proportion to the effects of the original misadventure e.g. a tutor lost data many years ago and since then has printed out anything that they may reuse and filed it. Less extreme but similar, several tutors said that the only place that they felt was safe for storing materials was on their personal PC or laptop hard drives – but these were not necessarily backed up to a level that would ensure no loss of data in the case of any system crash – so the perception of security was paramount and individual.
PRMS are influenced by the features and limits of the currently-available technology; and also the individual’s awareness of the nature and potential of new and emerging technology. But the social and cultural factors relating to context and use of a repository are as potentially significant as the technological aspects of the products being adopted.
Many feel that changing their current practice would be tempting disaster because it introduces an unproven alternative. It’s not that there is a lack of interest in changing, more that there is a need for new systems to be transparent and robust. Interfaces need to be easy to use and intuitive.

6. Developing a Wiki/Blog repository to promote sharing - 1
Resources
Relevant and current
Critical mass important
Quality
Author credibility
(personal profiles)
The potential for the use of wiki and blogs within higher education has been written about a lot. [pot in the areas of teaching, learning, research and administration. They are scaleable from the individual to the institutional level]. Tutors are organising their resources using blogs, for example by turning off the comment feature and using a new post as the repository for all links or materials relating to the latest section/unit/module of the course. We found that tutors posted resources on the wiki that we piloted e.g. assignment marking schemes, ‘help’ guides (e.g. the OU in prisons, guides to plagarism, things students need to know about tutors and so on).
To achieve a successful wiki/blog repository within which a community is actively sharing and collaborating on resources there a various practical considerations. Many of will be common to other types of repository.
Resources need to be relevant to the user groups; critical mass in terms of people using the system and the resources contained within it is important. (Depending on the community’s nature and the backgrounds of its members it may be necessary to nurture and support it until it becomes self-sustaining). Tutors felt the most important and useful things to share were those that would reduce the time and tedium of tutoring e.g. marking templates and standardised assignment feedback comments; worked examples and exercises; or useful weblinks, all are materials that can be recycled for use with subsequent groups.
Some tutors are concerned about how resources might be viewed by others in terms of quality (and so how well they are perceived as performing) but others did not want to contribute anything that was not proven as good (but were assuming that they as individuals – not the potential end users – would be the best placed to confirm the resource as good for someone else's context).

7. Developing a Wiki/Blog repository to promote sharing - 2
Resources (cont.)
Metadata
Personal profile metadata
FOAF metadata application profile
Folksonomy-type metadata
A very interesting metadata finding has been that tutors are very happy to input personal metadata about themselves within the wiki/blog (perhaps due to kudos and networking reasons). They are not at all phased by being given a table containing a very large number of fields as long as they are not being forced into providing the information. [In fact they were quite happy with the default ELGG profile interface that the team were planning to radically reduce as they felt it was much more data than tutors would be willing to provide and would be very off-putting to users.] 
The project developed a recommended metadata profile for CPD profiles based on the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary. FOAF is a widely used social networking standard which will enable the import and export of profiles between the project systems and other personal networking systems, and is more flexible than formal education based profiles such as IMS LIP and EduPerson. The PROWE metadata profile has informed the development of the profile within “MyStuff”, the OU’s ePortfolio product. Details of the profile can be found in the PROWE Metadata report.
People don’t spend a lot of time managing their digital resources in any consistent or targeted way. Our research found that tutors only wanted to add minimal metadata for resources they deposited. They want folksonomy type metadata fields like those that you would find in del.icio.us or flickr.  For their up-loaded resources a title, description and a folksonomy field would be the acceptable maximum tutors would be happy to add. [so any other data would need to be generated through automation and extraction form other university systems.]

8. Developing a Wiki/Blog repository to promote sharing - 3
Easy to retrieve and to up-load resources
"Amazon.com" star rating and cross referencing systems
Content security
Accessible from anywhere by anyone
Ability to share with anyone
Provide for discussion
One of the motivators for using a repository is the ability to find resources easily (to avoid having to phone people up or them to ask for things). So a repository needs to be easy to navigate and have a powerful search engine. Plus the ability to easily up-load resources. For finding or using others’ resources, tutors would like abstracts but not anonymous reviews. Several mentioned."Amazon.com" recommendation and review systems along the lines of "those customers who bought this title also bought…". I suspect that they would like to know what resources other tutors have read and used.
Content security – Tutors were concerned about loss of control over original work, and of potential misappropriation. It's OK for others to use it but originating authors want to keep track of the original. This raised debates around ownership of knowledge and the authorship of learning/teaching materials. Audit trails and version control are important. We developed a PROWE Copyright Notice and stated that this is what we expected users to abide by. 
As is accessibility from anywhere. Several tutors reported that they were now making use of online file storage, such as Google.docs or storage available though free accounts hosted outside the institution (e.g. GMail). Some were concerned about hackers and security. Wiki and blogs used within education need to meet the web accessibility standards.
Some tutors belong to more than one institution. For some, the ability to share or transfer resources between more than one institution would be useful [none of Leicester’s tutors mentioned this as a requirement].
Some tutors would like a system to provide for discussion (on learning aids, teaching materials, ideas etc.)

9. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink…
This English idiom means you can offer something to someone, like good advice, but you cannot make them take it.
In the same way, you can provide a wiki and a blog for tutors to use as a repository, but you can’t make them use them.
Incredible variability - tutors may not be comfortable with the technology and want to continue doing things the way they always have (perhaps due to past experiences). Context is relevant – they will only share if they can see a benefit in doing so.
There has been a recent explosion of so called Web 2.0 technologies. Some tutors would prefer to use a wiki/blog based repository provided by their institution (perhaps because it is the ‘officially approved’ one, it’s ‘safe’, well tested etc). But increasingly, those who are more technology aware will be already using technologies (perhaps the educational networks within elgg or ning) within which they can collaboratively author content and from which they can link to and share their resources (perhaps contained within sites that promote sharing such as google docs/egnyte.com or in delicious, on flickr, you-tube, slideshare etc) and will be reluctant to move from them.
At a time when many tutors are peripatetic and/or based in multiple institutions we need to find sustainable solutions in order to both preserve the materials resulting from their teaching and promote that work as evidence of their professional competence. In terms of ePortfolios, a secure national service such as UKERNA could be a solution.
There are lessons to be learned about the relationship between the fluidity of Internet and open source web technologies and the solidity of established institutional priorities, practices and attitudes. Institutions are challenged to ensure that their technology developments and their culture keep pace with the external environment.
[When PROWE started, online social networking tools such as wiki and blogs were relatively new. The pace of web-technology advancement during the project’s life-time has been rapid. The term ‘Web 2.0,’ has been adopted widely. Well developed open source blog and wiki technology has become freely available for individual and group use - no need to host and set up on your own server, just create your account and start straight away. These social networking tools have proliferated and along with RSS (which two years ago was only being used for news headlines but has since expanded to supplying other feeds from content like blogs, Internet calendars and podcasts etc.) their integration within institutional websites is becoming mainstream The last couple of years have seen the development of many online repositories containing social networking aspects including Flickr, LibraryThing, SlideShare and You-Tube, some of which will be relevant to tutors and their resources. In addition we have seen the development of educational social networks within sites such as Elgg, Ning and Facebook within which communities of tutors are forming. There is also easier free access to online storage, for example through Google.docs which offers some direct equivalents to the services that the PROWE systems offer.
It would be interesting for new projects to explore tutors’ (students and academic institutions) use of social and professional networking tools (e.g. MySpace, Facebook and others). Research could look at whether communities of tutors are forming there and if so how are they sharing resources and furthering their professional development within these tools. There is some anecdotal evidence of such OU communities in Facebook, for example, and, equally interesting, of cross staff/student groups operating. It could also look at institutional presence within these tools and how staff of particular institutions have begun development of applications for their institutions.
Personalised ‘web start pages’, for example iGoogle, Pageflakes and Netvibes provide personal information environments and have the potential to replace university provided portals. It would be interesting to research how people are accessing and aggregating their web-based resources and services and to what extent the University community is using and developing applications for these personalised 'web start pages'. Would staff and students, for example, like to have a tab populated with resources from their own University? Last week pageflakes developed pageflakes for teachers.]
©Tara Shriner

10. Contacts Web page: http://www.prowe.ac.uk
Project
Project Manager:

11. PROWE: “A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” Henrik Ibsen