Superación dos modelos tradicionais

The initial experience of innovation involved me in multiple roles: a beginner learner, a participatory mentor and an on-going learner, and a mediator.

4.3.4.1 A beginner learner

The adoption of wikis required me to be an expert while I regarded myself as nowhere near that level. I was still a beginner learner as the first study task was commenced. Not only did I feel a need to be an expert in terms of wikis but more importantly the learner participants were viewing me as an expert. My assumption from the learner participants’ standpoint was that me being their former teacher and now a researcher would help identify who I was in relation to what I was doing.

In the first place I felt both excited and thrilled about this new thing, in particular writing on Wikipedia. However, the feelings were not purely those of a new player, for I was preoccupied by how to transfer this excitement and initial expertise to the learner participants.

4.3.4.2 A participatory mentor and an on-going learner

I had to provide mentoring to the learner participants while they implemented the two study tasks. I did that work while I was still a beginner learner in the new space. On reflection, the experience of being a mentor in this initial experience of innovation presented me with challenges in terms of identity in this role.

4.3.4.2.1 Self pressure

The first challenge came from me, the pressure I put on myself, especially within the short time frame available. I wanted to be a good resource for the learner participants when it came to at least technology mentoring. The fact that they were voluntarily taking part in an innovation study was a good reminder: they could easily feel discouraged and step back in front of a small issue if I was not of help to them.

Mentoring and learning at the same time was also a challenge. To my belief, while mentoring needed precise and timely help, learning, beginner learning to be exact, entailed ‘trial and error’. Although I was honest to the learner participants about my novice status in this new learning space, I felt the need to possess a good deal of

105 knowledge about wikis to be able to design tasks and the part I played in the tasks. This was actually a considerable issue in mentoring in a new online environment: how much novice knowledge and how much expert knowledge a mentor needed to be able to interact in an acceptable way. The incident of the article Good Language Learners

being removed from Wikipedia in the late stage of Task Two has been keeping me pondering about this issue. What if I had known more about Wikipedia and would possibly have been able to mentor the learners about the encyclopaedic genre?

A further challenge especially relating to my identity as a mentor came from what I interpreted from the learner participants’ standpoint. Firstly, their interview responses explicitly indicated that they expected me to be a good instructor of new technologies. They also expected to learn a new practice from me, as a researcher, a former teacher, and currently a colleague of theirs. To my feeling, these multiple lenses they used amplified the expectations they had of me.

4.3.4.2.2 Frustration

Task One implementation took me through some stressful times, for example when responses from the participants were very sparse; that was expressed in my research journal:

I understand their busy status and sometimes feel reluctant to contact them and/or remind them. […] I fear that we may not be able to have a Wikipedia entry titled Hue People as we planned earlier. I really want to change the plan or the working strategy but I don’t know how. I feel that I sometimes cannot understand how they feel and what they want. Sometimes I asked them to have a say but they did not. Online communication seems to be a challenge in the way that I cannot “reach” my learner participants when I want to (Research Journal, 20 April 2011).

The frustration to me was that I did not know which relationship between me and the learner participants I should draw on to make decision. When the writing did not move on, I was not able to make decision on my own to progress the work. To make matters worse, I was not able to maintain a good communication with the learner participants. As a matter of fact, at times I felt the loss of participant connection.

An additional site of frustration concerned the emergent issue from the Wikipedia editors’ feedback. I was not able to provide what I believed an appropriate level and

106 amount of communication with the editors concerning how to proceed with the work on Wikipedia. In Task Two in particular, while the feedback implied a considerable change of writing, I found it frustrating to decide whether or not to continue with the editors’ suggestions of editing the writing Good Language Learners. In terms of mentor identity, the frustration involved what I believed was required of me as a mentor, what it meant to be a mentor.

4.3.4.2.3 Active and adaptive learning

In an online learning context, new things keep coming, and we have to keep learning with the eyes wide open (Researcher Journal, 5 September 2011).

This entry captures my belief about what was required in terms of mentor learning. It resulted from my experience on Wikipedia, particularly through the Wikipedia editors’ feedback, which, as I said in my Researcher Journal, had actually introduced a new issue to me, the issue of encyclopaedic genre, and voice and identity on cyber space. Through this experience, I had come to realise that the new online environment required an ability to be more flexible, open, and tolerant to ambiguities, which all belong to key qualities of an active and adaptive learner.

4.3.4.3 The mediator

The experience on Wikipedia also introduced a new role for me, the role of a mediator. On reflection, I was not ready to take over this role in the first place. It involved me stepping in between two parties: between my learner participants and the Wikipedia editors, to bring the writing work to a due settlement. This job terribly challenged me in terms of mentor identity.

4.3.4.3.1 A site of struggle

Receiving the Wikipedia editors’ feedback particularly when they removed the writing and suggested a considerable change to the writing work in terms of content and a suitable site on Wikipedia to post it, I had not been able to decide on my own what to do until I talked about it with my supervisors. The site of negotiation was whether or not I should step in. On the one hand, I believed that once the article had been published, it would certainly be subject to public scrutiny, thus I would like the learner participants to experience this directly without my intervention. On the other hand, I was also a participatory member involved in the writing process and responsible for the article, and the editors were addressing the four of us as team members: “I can’t withdraw from the

107 editors” was the final decision I made, out of bravery, as I wrote in the Researcher Journal:

I have been feeling brave after talking with Cynthia and Gillian about what to do with the editors’ feedback. The necessary thing I have been able to do was I have responded to the editors (Researcher Journal, 19 September 2011).

4.3.4.3.2 Responsibility

I was pleased about the decision to step in between the two parties, at least because it helped me to do better the job of mentoring. Although the course of innovation had been evolving beyond my control, the new role as it unfolded gave me a better vantage point, from which I felt more able to mentor the learner participants thanks to an insider’s view. On reflection, the mediator role was a large part of the mentor self. I had been driven by the latter to capture this opportunity as a (potential) learning resource for the learner participants. I noted this in the Researcher Journal as a major task for me to do:

The most important thing for me is how to make the learners reasonably interpret the Wikipedia experience (Researcher Journal, 19 September 2011). I was not sure if I had done well enough to “make the learners reasonably interpret the Wikipedia experience”, but what I did out of my responsibility as a mentor was I talked with them, both informally via Skype chat upon me receiving the messages and later formally via interview, what we (including me as a team member) had learnt from this particular experience, which concerned their posts being removed because they were not aligned with the genre. In our talk, I focused on the new dimension of academic writing that we as teachers of English had not been aware of before (I shared with them my feelings of learning this as a learner). I also explicitly mentioned to the participants that the involvement of the Wikipedia editors through their messages was so much of a meaningful aspect of our tasks that we should appreciate and thank them, and that was thus why I responded to the editors’ messages very politely and gratefully. All participants showed their appreciation of the editors’ messages in our talks.