Integrating a wiki into support for group cognition

The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project is part of an effort to investigate group cognition— the accomplishment of problem-solving and knowledge-building tasks by small groups, particularly in online, distributed contexts. The VMT environment has recently integrated a wiki component into its text chat and shared whiteboard system. The wiki component serves a number of purposes, such as summarizing synchronous small-group interactions and sharing the results among groups in a knowledge-building community. We are exploring ways of integrating activities in the different work-space components, such as automating the posting of text from the whiteboard to a wiki page associated with the chat room, allowing collaborative browsing and editing of the wiki from the whiteboard, referencing elements of the wiki from the chat, and facilitating seamless navigation among the components. The wiki pages for chat rooms are automatically linked via categories within a 'wikipedia' for the specific domain of interest to the knowledge-building community. The VMT system including wiki is currently being used for middle-school, high-school and junior college math students, for masters-level information science students and for research teams. Logs of VMT system usage in these authentic settings are analyzed in considerable detail; to date, about a hundred publications have resulted from research on the VMT system. This symposium contribution focuses on technological design issues stemming from the pedagogical goal of integrating knowledge building at individual, small-group and classroom levels. Detailed analysis of how technology is actually used plays a central role in VMT’s design-based research approach.