The Shoemaker's Children: Using Wikis for Information Systems Teaching, Research, and Publication

Abstract

This paper argues that Web 2.0 tools, specifically wikis, have begun to influence business and knowledge sharing practices in many organizations. Information Systems researchers have spent considerable time exploring the impact and implications of these tools in organizations, but those same researchers have not spent sufficient time considering whether and how these new technologies may provide opportunities for us to reform our core practices of research, review, and teaching. To this end, this paper calls for the IS discipline to engage in two actions related to wikis and other 1 Carol Saunders was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Web 2.0 tools. First, the IS discipline ought to engage in critical reflection about how wikis and other Web 2.0 tools could allow us to conduct our core processes differently. Our existing practices were formulated during an era of paperbased exchange; wikis and other Web 2.0 tools may enable processes that could be substantively better. Nevertheless, users can appropriate information technology tools in unexpected ways, and even when tools are appropriated as expected there can be unintended negative consequences. Any potential changes to our core processes should, therefore, be considered critically and carefully, leading to our second recommended action. We advocate and describe a series of controlled experiments that will help assess the impact of these technologies on our core processes and the associated changes that would be necessary to use them. We argue that these experiments can provide needed information regarding Web 2.0 tools and related practice changes that could help the discipline better assess whether or not new practices would be superior to existing ones and under which circumstances.

Learning by Doing: Twenty Successful Active Learning Exercises for Information Systems Courses

“…Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and social bookmarking have been used in previous research to develop a collaborative knowledgebase for a class Kane & Fichman, 2009). Agarwal and Ahmed (2013) used a wiki tool to help write test questions and found that this tool led to a student-centric and concept-centric learning experience.…”

How to improve the quality of peer reviews? – Three suggestions for system-level changes

“…Other researchers have also made suggestions about how to use IT to support the review process (e.g., Mandaviwalla, Patnayakuni, & Schuff, 2008;Kane & Fichman, 2009;Hardaway & Scamell, 2012). However, when resorting to technology, one should consider the "business" rules of reviewing to be embedded in the technology and the role of technology in the larger system of publishing.…”

Twittermania: Understanding How Social Media Technologies Impact Engagement and Academic Performance of a New Generation of Learners

“…They are convinced that the adoption of social media technologies is responsible for ill social behavioral problems among users and, in particular, students (Galagan, 2010). While these instructors view social media technologies as a form of "behavioral menace to society", others (Kane & Fichman, 2009) view them as a viable tool for engaging students (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008). In this paper, we focus on how to leverage Twitter to engage students with their course materials "in" and "out" of the classroom.…”

“…Moreover, the spontaneous interaction patterns on microblogging services -such as Twitter provide a shared space for participants to collaboratively validate their mental model representations of the discussion topic (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard, 1986). In response to calls for research in the IS discipline on appropriating SMTs tools in teaching (Kane & Fichman, 2009), we draw from engagement theory (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1998) and social impact theory (Latane, 1981) to investigate how educators and students can leverage Twitter as an innovative tool to support engagement and learning.…”