Is Wiki a Good Tool Facilitating Team Collaboration in Undergraduate Education?

As one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications, the wiki has been widely acknowledged to be capable of promoting team collaboration. However the literature on adopting wiki in educational contexts has generated inconsistent results in performance consequences. The present study depicted a picture of how undergraduate students employed the wiki and explored whether the wiki usage could indeed promote team collaboration. Using an exploratory case study with multiple data sources, our results showed that using the wiki might transit a better evaluation of collaboration effectiveness by the students, though the actual performance seemed to be another independent issue. While some capabilities of the wiki were believed to promote collaboration, students’ positive attitude toward the wiki was still limited due to several reasons. Findings were discussed and implications on how educators may reap the beneficial consequences of wiki use were suggested.