A wiki space provides an excellent opportunity for group collaboration and discussion. In an online environment, I find the threaded discussion forums easier to follow specific online conversations. In a discussion forum each thread, provides information on that one related topic. A wiki provides a large unified space to assemble and connect many ideas together in a visual webpage format, as opposed to the small discussion window. Allowing members to contribute to an assignment in a wiki is a great alternataive.
This is different than group collaboration in the typical classroom environment which relies on synchronous face-to-face communiction. This type of collaboration can sometime be hard for students to stay on task, as they can easily lose focus with conversation turning social instead of task related. Quite often, a few students will carry the group in terms of the work load, as others quietly sit back and contribute very little. An advantage to using a wiki, is that quiet reserved individuals have the same opportunity and voice as more outspoken students. In addition, it is easy to see who has contibuted, as individuals must log in to contibute. A teacher can look back through the history to see who has edited the wiki. One possible challenge of working with others in a collaborative wiki space is that it will take a lot longer to produce a collaborative assignment becuase of the asynchronous nature of a wiki. It can also be very time consuming for an instructor to go and look back through the history of a wiki if they have many groups with many contributions.
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