Infrastructure and Wiki Pedagogy: A Multi-Case Study

Current theories of wiki pedagogy, which hold that wikis can be valuable tools for collaboration and socially constructing knowledge in the classroom, have not thoroughly considered how wikis are experienced by introductory writing teachers who are not already wiki scholars. With infrastructure as a theoretical lens, this study uses data collected from two immersion narratives to examine how introductory writing instructors use and talk about wikis in their courses. Overall, the study found that the level of a wiki's embeddedness in a course can have a significant effect on its perceived usefulness and that immersion into using new technologies can have significant outcomes for both teachers and students. These findings suggest that wikis influence and are influenced by the infrastructures they belong to, that there are both physical and ideological barriers to successfully incorporating a wiki into a course infrastructure, and that immersion narratives can be a useful method for studying wikis. Because of these implications, the essay concludes with a call for more classroom-based inquiry as a means of reflective practice.