Wikis!
How the group collaboration and discussion within the wiki space differed from what you are accustomed to in a standard threaded discussion space
In regards to how we used the Wiki space, it didn’t really differ all that much from our standard threaded discussion. I think this might be attributed to the fact that we all want to gain our individual participation marks so we feel it necessary to write our own names after each post. In more open wiki spaces (such as wikipedia), contributions are made by updating what someone else has written before them, such is the nature of wikis. However, we kept very much to a type of threaded discussion. The only truly collaborative writing in our wiki were the five key strategies for engaging students using social media and the 5 key challenges for engaging students using social media.
Advantages of using wikis for group collaboration
Using wikis provides a workspace in which all of the authors collaborate to create one piece of work. When used properly, they can be very powerful, especially in creating authentic, factually accurate projects. When more and more people edit the same work it lessens the chance for errors. People will also see where their own work has been corrected by another user and learn from their own mistakes. Wikis also present the opportunity for multiple perspectives and multiple learning types. For example, one person may add only text, while another interjects video, and yet another embeds audio files. This will make for a richer learning experience for everyone.
Challenges of working with others in a collaborative wiki space
An issue for teachers might be grades. If a wiki becomes so distant from any single contributions, how can a teacher grade the work? Is there any way of monitoring exact participation. Further, group ownership requires individual responsibility and accountability. I have been in UBC courses where students have not had any experience editing wikis and mistakenly deleted everyone’s work. Also, I do not think that wikis are as intuitive as other web 2.0 interfaces that include formatting bars. You do have to learn some code in order to use wikis to their full potential. Also, students may feel offended when their work has been updated or removed by another person. Students may feel that differences of opinion on how content should be displayed or written might be reason enough to rewrite or delete another person’s work.