Google Wave and Student Knowledge Work

My friend and colleague Paul Gestwicki and I are headed to Pittsburgh early next week to participate in a workshop on Computer Supported Peer Review in Education (CSPRED). This workshop is held in conjunction with the 10th annual Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We're particularly excited about the full day event, because it represents the first material fruits of our labor with exploring Google Wave as an enabling technology for student knowledge work.

We've been hard at work since winter break—sharing ideas, reviewing different bodies of literature, writing grant proposals, publication proposals, and even attending Google I/O in order to meet with and learn from members of the Wave team and third-party Wave developers. Our work is beginning to pay off, as we've recently received a $10,000 Emerging Media Innovation Grant from Ball State University's Emerging Media Initiative. Paul and a student assistant have been working very hard of late on the the technical architecture of the ideas we've been discussing, creating robots and gadgets that interoperate with Wave and Google App Engine.

One of the things we're interested in doing is producing visualizations of student knowledge work as a step toward enabling greater metacognition and modeling activities. We also see Wave as affording robust opportunities for formative assessment and community involvement, easing the collaborative sharing of knowledge as well as opportunities for productive member checks with research subjects.

At this early stage, our work is very much in progress and developing. I've included below the pre-publication version of our concept paper, "Using realtime writing technology to enable continuous formative evaluation of collaborative knowledge work," to be published in the CSPRED proceedings. I've also included the poster we produced in conjunction with the paper (and, to be fair, I should say the poster that Paul produced—I simply wrote the copy and threw out a couple of ideas); the poster is significant in that it provides some of the visualizations we couldn't fit in the short paper, and includes a use case scenario. Special thanks in particular to Christa Teston, whose white paper assignment is one that I've stolen for this fall's Professional Writing course; that assignment serves as the basis for the use case described in the poster.

Thankfully, this is just the beginning. Paul and I have a chapter in the works for a forthcoming edited collection, and we're most excited about developing this summer, implementing in the fall, and embarking on a qualitative study in the spring.