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Use of wikis in education reflects a shift in the education paradigm from lecture and individual homework-based to a paradigm emphasizing student engagement and the construction of knowledge through collaboration and peer-help. Existing research work on the use of wiki in collaborative writing had given mixed results. The goals of this research are to investigate whether wiki supports learning of writing and argumentation skills, and whether the students are motivated to use it and see it as a useful learning tool. Our participants comprise ten senior undergraduate students of a Computer Science class, who engaged in collaborative writing using wiki for four weeks. Their contributions were graded by a designated TA. The grades assigned to both their final articles and individual contributions, and the wiki logs were analyzed to determine the quality and volume of their weekly contributions, while feedback was taken from them using questionnaire to sample their perception of the use of wiki in writing. Our results showed that the use of wiki is helpful in improving their writing skill. However, participants are not happy with the further use of wiki in their course work. Also, we found that they require extrinsic motivation, in form of feedback (grades) from the TA and acceptance of their contribution by their peers, to increase their participation in wiki writing.

Wiki system has been deployed in many collaborative learning projects. However, lack of motivation is a serious problem in the collaboration process. The wiki system is originally designed to hide authorship information. Such design may hinder users from being aware of task conflict, resulting in undesired outcomes (e.g. reduced motivation, suppressed knowledge exchange activities). We propose to incorporate two different tools in wiki systems to motivate learners by increasing awareness of task conflict. A field test was executed in two collaborative writing projects. The results from a wide-scale survey and a focus group study confirmed the utility of the new tools and suggested that these tools can help learners develop both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to contribute. This study has several theoretical and practical implications, it enriched the knowledge of task conflict, proposed a new way to motivate collaborative learning, and provided a low-cost resolution to manage task conflict.