Adwiki: Socio-Technical Design for Mananging Advising Knowledge in a Higher Education Context

Educational institutions worldwide are undergoing significant transformation in response to the changing economic scenario which is pressuring them to be innovative while reassessing their allotment of resources. As a result, many institutions are moving towards large-scale use of information technology (IT) to manage knowledge at different organizational levels. The authors present findings from a case study of an action research project undertaken to design and implement a web-based advising system for managing and sharing knowledge required by first-year engineering students. The primary users of the system were faculty members who advised students, as well as the students themselves. By following a participatory action research approach in combination with a socio-technical framework, the designed and implemented system – AdWiki – improved the use of existing advising resources as well as created new advising practices by integrating IT and organizational processes. In addition to socio-technical design literature their findings corroborate and extend the Socio-Technical Systems Engineering (STSE) framework. They provide evidence that ‘sensitization and awareness’ and ‘constructive engagement’, two core activities proposed in the STSE framework, can be effectively applied in practice to integrate organizational process and technological possibilities for managing knowledge. Findings from the case study also extend the socio-technical approach by incorporating components of action research into the framework and demonstrating the use of methods that allowed for virtual participation in systems development.