Introduction
A subset of faculty choose to design their research programs exclusively around undergraduate student involvement1 and a research-group specific wiki site can make student-to-student knowledge transfer more efficient. Undergraduate research has been deemed one of the high-impact practices,2 Through close faculty-student mentorship, it provides a personal education that trains students in the art of inquiry and encourages intellectual independence.3-6 Successful undergraduate research programs abound including the computational chemistry consortium of faculty known as MERCURY.7 Undergraduate research is challenging for many reasons,8-10 and students know less disciplinary content when they begin research. Oftentimes, a faculty member must teach a student everything about the research because students haven’t had the prerequisite course work. Sustaining an undergraduate research program therefore becomes highly dependent on a steady transfer of knowledge between the faculty member and the students or amongst students.
One of the largest impediments to maintaining group productivity is short student research group membership. To lengthen the research training period, some faculty let students join their research group as early as freshman year or in a pre-frosh program. In the best of circumstances, students are in research groups for 4 years plus a summer before or after college. On the other end of the spectrum, students may join a research group for an academic year or a summer. In the ideal scenario, someone in the group besides the principal investigator always knows a portion of the collective group knowledge to pass on to new students. In undergraduate research labs, sometimes interests of incoming students do not overlap with outgoing students or there are few overlapping students. In addition, students who are knowledgeable might spend all their time training other students in the lab and not have adequate time to accomplish their own work. Traditionally gaps in knowledge transfer have been covered by maintaining a paper repository of protocols, a lab manual for the group, a series of How-To-PowerPoints deposited in a communal drive, or theses and supplementary materials of undergraduate theses.
Collective knowledge can also be maintained with a laboratory wiki, a wiki website customized for your laboratory. The author’s group has had a laboratory wiki, lab wiki for short, since 2006. It has survived two institution moves and a rotation of group projects spanning disparate methods and applications. Over 50 students have contributed to the lab wiki. At first the lab wiki just contained the group’s short list of tutorials such as a short guide to Unix, Vi text editing, how to submit jobs to the queue and some data analysis tips. As students gained expertise in topics, they were asked to write a tutorials or lab wiki pages on their topic of expertise. Now the lab wiki the central resource for maintaining and passing on research group knowledge.