Conclusions

This chapter addresses the first tier of the analysis and the ability of a wiki to support collaborative work in a distance-education course.

The one concept that was consistent across the students of both courses is the agreement that a wiki can support group working primarily because of its ability to support recording content. This is supported in Section 5.4 where the online tools survey found that the students considered the wiki an effective tool as a repository to enter data and to share their ideas; but was less useful for the tasks of developing and refining that wiki content.

One issue that became apparent, affecting several of the emergent concepts, is that the wiki had technical deficiencies. Possible solutions to the technical deficiencies are covered in Chapter 8, where the concepts and their implications are discussed. In one area, discussion, the Business students were more content that the Computing students. The Business course used a dedicated discussion tool to supplement the wiki. In consequence, the Business students did not raise the same concerns about

discussion that the Computing students did. The numerous approaches adopted in the Computing course to discussing the requirements they were developing suggests that the wiki was not appropriate to that task. The need to support discussion is arguably a

crucial factor in the use of a wiki to facilitate group working, because group work, by its nature, requires discussion.

The placement of discussion was heavily influenced by two other concepts. The first is the practical issue of knowing when the wiki has been updated; students did not want to have to check the wiki daily to find out. To address this issue there was the

widespread use of e-mail to notify group members of updates, because students did check their e-mail daily. Once the use of e-mail to supplement the group wiki was established, it was adopted by several groups for discussion too because it was a medium they were already familiar with for discussion. Since the Business students had already used a dedicated discussion tool, the wiki was undermined in its role of

supporting discussion, and consequently was less able to support the refinement and development of its content.

This undermining of the use of the wiki to record discussion was reinforced by the difficulty of distinguishing an individual student’s contributions. The students were concerned about how best they could enter and identify their work and as this could not be clearly and automatically done in the wiki, many saw this as a weakness. This relates to other concepts that suggest unhappiness with the wiki on the part of the students: the lack of inherent structure, lack of pre-defined rules, and lack of pre- defined roles. These all result from the wiki’s flexibility; the wiki philosophy is that such concerns are not imposed as part of the wiki, but emerge from use of the wiki to best meet users’ needs. In the absence of imposed constraints, inconsistency in wiki use emerged. Within the time available in the course, the students could neither create their own wiki structure, which undermined their confidence in the wiki, nor effectively define roles and rules, which undermined their confidence in the collaborative activity.

The wiki was not reported to enable group formation. The VLE statistics revealed that the ice-breaker mini-biographies went unread once the ice-breaker activity was

completed. However, the wiki’s ability to support asynchronous work, even across time zones, did prove useful to several groups. One may conclude that at a pragmatic, if not social, level a wiki has a role to play in supporting groups.

Throughout the courses there was some social chat, and much of what there was took place through the supplied forums (FirstClass for the Computing students, VLE forum for the Business). That this should not transfer to the wikis is not surprising as the forums were the established tools with which the students were familiar from other courses. Therefore, this study cannot conclude anything about the ability of a wiki to sustain social chat, other than it could not supplant an existing dedicated tool. However, other discussion, including that most directly related to the collaborative work such as planning and progressing the collaborative document, generally took place outside the wiki too. Other online tools, especially e-mail, were preferred. The factor that led student to prefer the use of e-mail for communication has already been noted: the message was delivered to the student without them having to check the wiki.

Therefore, one may conclude that the wiki can support group work because it enabled students to record their ideas, but the students preferred other tools to develop and refine those ideas. The different tools available to the students suggest this to be the case, with the Business students making good use of the provided VLE forum. The Computing students explored various means of tracking their developing ideas in the wiki, as will be related in more detail in the next chapter, and they explored various alternatives to the wiki for this task.

This suggests a potential weakness in wikis when used to support group work. A wiki can be effective at supporting co-operation, when the individuals work on their own tasks that are then merged to create a whole; however, it may be less effective in supporting collaboration, in which individuals work together on shared tasks. This, however, is dependent on the exact nature of the collaborative activity. However, the finding matches that reported in the first substantive section, that the students consider a wiki more effective in supporting capturing and recording ideas rather than refining and developing them.

The principal activities examined in this research required students to collaboratively author a document. The contrast in attitudes between the Computing and the Business students noted in this chapter, and the consequent manner in which they organised their groups, leads to a larger divergence in practices when looking at the ability of a wiki to support the students when they have to collaboratively author their documents. The second research tier analysing the role of a wiki to support collaborative authoring is the subject of the next chapter.