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.