Group Wikis

Use Case

Four students, Ally, Bill, Chris, and Dana, are working on their science fair project about ocean waves. Ally starts the group and invites the other students, she also types up a short description of the project and a time line showing when things need to be finished. Bill gets on the wiki and notices that Ally forgot to mention that a draft of their paper is due next Wednesday, so he adds it to the time line and also posts a link to a great website he found. Over the next few days the students share their notes and resources through the wiki and discuss what information should go into the paper. Chris and Dana, who have agreed to create the poster, add pictures of waves which everyone comments on to decide which should be used. Ally and Bill, who wrote a draft of the paper in a shared write activity, add it to the wiki for the others to see. They're able to fix mistakes and add new information right on the wiki page, if they decide they don't like a change that was made they can revert to an earlier version using the wiki's history.

Why Wikis

One might imagine that the functionality I'm describing could be implemented with traditional bulletin boards, or with something like contextual chatting interfaces, so why bother with the overhead of wikis?

Why not traditional forum-style threads?

There are a few things wrong with using forums for collaboration. For one, forums are organized temporally, so to get a good idea of what's being discussed you have to read every post from the start of the thread to the end. Also, collaboration is not just discussion, students will want to do things like draw up lists of goals which can be modified over time This is trivial with a wiki, but really doesn't work with forums.

Why not a contextual chatting interface?

Contextual chatting is very nice for quick notes, and for working in real time with others, but they're very limited in a number of ways. You can only display as much information as can fit on a single screen with a contextual interface, this just won't work for long projects with complex goals which need to be described at length. Also, they lack the versatility of wikis for dealing with changing content (such as, again, a list of goals). Lastly, because wikis are capable of doing version control, they're much better suited for dealing with individuals who have sporadic connectivity.

While wikis are less intuitive than the other options, they provide of level of control and scalability which is far superior to both. Plus, there are a number of wiki applications already available, such as MikMik, and the school server comes with MediaWiki installed.