A reader of Jack Vinson’s blog asked the following question about how to help students do a better job of collaboration using a wiki:

[I am working on a Senior Design* course in chemical engineering.] We have encouraged the students to post their work on wikis created for each project. The quality of these postings is generally not very good. Are there some papers, etc that might help the next years students do a better job of collaboration via this (or other) computer technique?

Jack mentioned my website, and the article The State of Wikis in Education, but commented that it doesn’t address the “how to make it work better” question. (That article was the product of an interview on the current state of affairs, not a how-to piece, so that’s why it doesn’t address the question.) It’s an important question, so let’s address it.

Jack’s reader says: “The quality of these postings is generally not very good.” The use of the word postings makes me wonder how exactly the students were using the wiki. Did they build the project from scratch on the wiki? Or did they simply post project materials on the wiki after the fact?

I’m willing to bet that they posted information on the wiki,... read more >>

Enterprise wikis (the ones primarily used at work for things like meeting agendas and minutes, managing projects, documentation and reports, etc.) and Internet wikis (Wikipedia and Wikitravel are popular examples) differ in several significant ways:

1. Organization and Access

Internet wikis often have all content housed in one “place,” so that anyone can access the entirety of the site’s content. Enterprise wikis, by contrast, allow for information to be organized in individual workspaces based on project, department, team, etc., and access to those spaces can be granted to specific people.

2. Security

Internet wikis are often open for anyone to read and edit, sometimes without even requiring one to login. Enterprise wikis are typically not open to the public or partially open, i.e. some spaces are open but others are not. To access an enterprise wiki, you have to login, and your account has to have permissions set so that you can access particular spaces. Permissions can also be set at the page level, so that a person might login, access a particular space, and have editing rights on some pages, but only viewing rights on others.

3. Integration

Enterprise wikis are designed to allow us... read more >>