Understanding User Perceptions on Usefulness and Usability of an Integrated Wiki-G-Portal

This paper describes briefly the design rationale and philosophy of our implementation of a Wiki-G-Portal project, integrating Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, into G-Portal, a Web-based digital library, of geography resources. Initial findings from pilot study seemed to suggest positive perceptions on usefulness and usability of Wiki-G-Portal, as well as subjects’ attitude and intention to use Wiki-G-Portal. The paper concludes with recommendations for further work. 1 Towards Community-Based Geospatial Digital Libraries In addition to addressing text-based attributes, special subject-based digital libraries (DLs) such as geospatial DLs, have also emerged focusing on location-based attributes. However, current implementations of geospatial DLs concentrate much on content creation by designers/developers/content providers mostly for the purposes of education. For example, the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype System [14] provides students with “learning spaces”, personalized collections of geospatial resources relevant to one or more concepts or hypotheses. Through the process of exploring, manipulating and interacting with the resources in these learning spaces, students’ scientific reasoning skills in geography may be cultivated. QUIZIT [18] and PILOT [3] provide a Web-based environment for testing and grading. In another project, PAPER [16] adopts a “bottom-up” approach in which students are first assisted with examination preparation. As students explore examination questions and solutions, PAPER provides related higher-level concepts for them to investigate, allowing them to draw associations between various geographical issues and developing their reasoning skills. Although geospatial DLs are beginning to play key roles in education, especially in the provision of information to learners, there is a lack of systematic support in ensuring that geography resources are continually being monitored and updated. This is far from desirable, since within the classroom environment, DLs have the potential to be useful tools for active learning in which activities are characterized by active engagement, problem-solving, inquiry, and collaboration with others so that each student constructs meaning and hence knowledge of the information gained [11, 12]. Consider for example, a group of high school students working on a course project. Typical activities would require these students to acquire content from the teacher, gather reference materials from the library or other sources such as the Web, compile and make sense of all the available information, synthesize content, write the project report and submit the completed project for grading. Here, DL services could be designed to support the activities of these students. An integrated work environment for example, could allow students to collaboratively retrieve and store personal and group information objects relevant to the task at hand. Such a DL would therefore depart from the traditional role of providing easy access to digital content, and instead become an integral part of the learning process. Despite such potential, many systems still offer basic levels of support for educational services, and users typically encounter one or more of the following problems: Content access is a separate task from other applications. Although advanced features for searching and browsing are available, DLs provide, at best, limited support for sharing the retrieved content to other applications that support learning [1]. Exceptions are query and data dissemination services through various protocols such as Z39.50 [10] and OAI [7] but these are usually between other DLs instead of with an integrated learning environment. DLs are not designed to cater to the needs of different learning activities. Instead, they excel at generic tasks such as cataloging/classifying content and metadata, searching and browsing. Thus, activities such as laboratory experiments and field studies that need to use the services of a DL must be tailored to its capabilities. DLs are often not designed to meet the learning needs of individuals or groups. They are rather created as a generic collection of services for their target user populations at large. Support for individuals or sub-groups within these target populations requiring specialized services or content are typically lacking. Single-user delivery of information. In DLs that support personalization, content is accessed and manipulated individually via personalized workspaces. One common side effect of this feature is that users are often unable to share their findings with other users. Thus while individual learning can be supported in such DLs, collaborative group-based learning becomes more difficult. Nevertheless, DLs are evolving from being static repositories of information in which access is limited to searching and browsing, to more subject-based DLs offer a greater array of services. These include giving users new ways to access, interact and manipulate content including annotations, workspaces and user content contributions, and towards a growing trend in recent years of community-based, participatory systems. Drawing upon the success of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com; retrieved 30 June, 2006), a community-contributed/moderated online encyclopedia, this paper describes our implementation of Wiki-G-Portal, an integration of Wikipedia into GPortal, a Web-based digital library, of geography resources. A pilot study was conducted to understand the usefulness and usability of such a system, and the viability of users’ acceptance towards more community-based geospatial DLs, when compared to current implementations of geospatial DLs. Outline of paper The remaining sections of this paper are structured as follows. Section 2 presents design rationale and philosophy of our implementation of an integrated Wiki-G-Portal. Section 3 reports the pilot study conducted to understand user perceptions of the usefulness and usability of the Wiki-G-Portal for the purpose of investigating a community-contributed approach for geospatial DLs. Results and analyses are described in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 discusses study results on the need for more community-based geospatial DLs, and concludes with recommendations for further work. 2 Our Implementation of an Integrated Wiki-G-Portal In this section, we briefly revisit our previous work on G-Portal, and explain the design rationale and philosophy of Wiki-G-Portal, an integration of Wikipedia into GPortal, so that their methods and findings can provide a background for the pilot study conducted.