Research

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Using a Wiki to Scaffold Primary-School Students’ Collaborative Writing
"This small-scale case study explores the challenges and potential benefits of a wiki for students and teachers in a primary-five English-language class in Hong Kong. The study examined how the wiki’s key affordances might help in scaffolding students during their collaborative writing projects. The study found that the use of a wiki in a class of primary-five students in a Chinese primary school where English is taught as a second language (L2) was perceived positively. Students enjoyed using the wiki, and the overall perception was that it helped foster teamwork and improved writing. The tracking functionality of the wiki gave in-depth information about the types of edits the students were making and helped the teacher to provide necessary support and feedback, scaffolding their editing process. Findings from this study may help illuminate how Web 2.0, specifically wikis, can help scaffold primary-school L2 writers in collaborative learning." []

Wiki as a Teaching Tool
"Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment. This paper explains wiki usage, investigates its contribution to various learning paradigms, examines the current literature on wiki use in education, and suggests additional uses in teaching software engineering." []

Evaluating Wiki as a tool to promote quality academic writing skill
"In this study we investigated undergraduate teacher trainees' use of wikis, focusing on the use of shared spaces to communicate ideas and generate course specific content. We explored how students, through such activities, were to able to improve their academic writing skills. We discuss writing as a social practice and discuss how wikis might promote better academic writing. With data derived from student discussion boards and a post-module e-mail questionnaire (N=35) our findings indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing as a result of using the wiki space. Collaborative writing was limited due to students' reluctance to change each others' work, but students appreciated the shared environment to discuss the course. Students reported their academic writing skills improved through use of the wiki." [|http://www.telearn.org/warehouse/158_Final_Paper_(001680v1).pdf]

Teaching & Learning The Spanish Aspect Using Blogs and Wikis: An Exploratory Study
//This study investigated the influence of asynchronous computer text based technologies on the students’ performance when learning the preterite and the imperfect aspects in Spanish. Two research questions guided the study: Research Question 1) Is there a difference in students’ achievement levels in Spanish preterite and imperfect between those using wiki technologies and those using blog technologies after controlling for pre-intervention achievement levels? and Research Question 2) Are there differences in satisfaction levels for students learning Spanish preterite and imperfect via blog technologies as compared to those learning via wiki technologies? Results indicate that there were not significant differences between students who use blog or wiki technologies on performance levels when controlling for pre-existing knowledge. Results also indicated that there were not significant differences in satisfaction levels between those students using a wiki and those using a blog. These results suggest that wikis and blogs are good potential tools that may facilitate the teaching and learning of problematic grammar structures in a narrative context.// []