A Collaborative Writing Approach to Wikis: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Wikis provide teachers with potentially significant opportunities for creating socially engaged tasks that require active student participation and collaboration. Wikis allow students to work together to develop content on the web, giving them a sense of how writing can be carried out collaboratively. Collaborative writing offer opportunities not only to practice literature review, academic reading and writing, but also to stimulate reflection, knowledge sharing, and critical thinking. However, despite the potential capabilities of wikis, true collaborative writing does not work by itself as the research literature clearly reveals. To foster collaborative writing, participation, and active involvement in wiki development, there is a need for a systematic approach to the construction of wikis. The aim of this paper is to allow students to develop wiki applications using a collaborative writing development approach based on rapid prototyping. The paper also reports on the evaluation of the approach by means of qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Finally, the implications of the approach for collaborative writing are critically discussed according to a set of requirements associated with software development considerations and pedagogical issues.