A Wiki for informal learning among social workers in a local health authority

This chapter uses actor-network theory (ANT) to understand how social workers, of a large Italian local health authority, might interact with a wiki space to share resources, inform practice, and maintain their professional identity. We begin by introducing the health authority, the role the social workers play within it, and the situation at the time the researchers became involved in the case. One important difference from other similar cases is that, in the presented case, the wiki is considered not as the first system to support learning among these social workers but as a potential replacement technology for an existing structured knowledge management system (KMS). We then describe the key concepts of ANT and how it can be used to analyze both social and technical aspects when a new information technology is proposed for adoption. ANT is applied in two ways. In a first section we have analyzed how social workers’s existing KMS was adopted, reconstructing the events leading to that choice and how they championed the idea of replacing the KMS with a wiki. In the second section we apply the ANT due process to consider the potential of the wiki as a replacement for the existing KMS and the relationships among the actors involved. Adoption of ANT to analyze the proposal for a wiki to support informal learning and professional identity among social workers in a local health authority was effective. ANT guided us to take into account not just the technological features offered by a wiki but also the social and contextual issues and the socio-technical interactions among the stakeholders. In the last section we describe how we designed a wiki implementation with the potential to both maintain the value of work completed to date and meet additional needs for informal learning and maintenance of professional identity. After presenting the criteria we adopted to select a wiki platform, principles to innovate the wiki space design with the social workers’ participation are described. We adopt an approach in between structure and self-organization balancing on the one hand the risks of limited user participation in the wiki space design due to an imposed and pre-defined structure and, on the other hand, user disorientation and confusion due to a blank and unpopulated wiki space. The section ends with a description of the structure and content of the seeded wiki and the new approach adopted to describe and find information through tagging and searching. We conclude that the successful adoption and sustainability of the wiki will depend on creating and strengthening its association with the other stakeholders participating in the project.