Effect of the Usage of Wikis on an Educational Context PEDRO ABREU, DANIEL CASTRO SILVA, PEDRO MENDES, VASCO VINHAS Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto and Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465 Porto, Portugal Received 28 July 2009; accepted 18 February 2010 ABSTRACT: The use of wiki tools in personal and professional contexts has increased in the past years. This article provides an overview on recent developments of wiki technologies, and tries to determine their acceptance level in an academic environment. Also, suggestions are presented that may influence future devel- opments in this area. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20434 INTRODUCTION Nowadays, having updated information on the web is crucial to several business and educational processes. However, up until recently, only computer experts, webdesigners, or individuals with high levels of knowledge regarding computers (the so called power users) were able to manage these kinds of web informa- tion repositories. This type of management consists fundamentally in updating contents, publishing new ones, besides being able to periodically redesign the web space’s structure. The issue has been addressed in the past few years where two notable success cases have emerge. One of the considered success cases is blogs. A blog is a kind of hybrid diary where a person can periodically publish an article on any subject that he/she thinks that might be interesting to the blogosphere (community that supports blogs), and those topics may be commented by any person belonging to the blog’s specific universe. This type of approach favors exchange of opinion between the publisher and the commenter. Despite blogs usefulness, there are other areas where coop- erative and concurrent content creation is important. Wikis (the name comes from a Hawaiian word meaning quickness) represent a good solution for these areas, as they consist summarily in a web page editable through a web browser [1]. Having the possibility to regularly update contents and immediately making them avail- able online is particularly useful for educational processes [2]. In this context, this article presents a study conducted in the second semester of the 2008/2009 academic calendar, having both stu- dents and teachers as test subjects. The goal of this study is to understand, on one hand, to what extent can wikis improve com- munication needs between several teachers of the same course and, on the other hand, how can this last possible improvement affect Correspondence to P. Abreu (pha@fe.up.pt). © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. the students’ interest by the topics of a specific course 1 , provid- ing a cooperative platform for groups of students to develop their work. Consequently a survey, which structure and objectives are further exposed, was conducted in two distinct scenarios described next. In the course regarding the first scenario there are around 15 teachers and 500 students. In a course of this dimension there is the need to constantly update contents. Teachers that lec- ture theory have to publish their presentations and their sources. The other teachers have to publish detailed information on prac- tical exercises, their sources, and some relevant information on the course like schedules, evaluation guidelines, bibliogra- phy, . . . For these purposes the chosen wiki engine was PmWiki with some extra features installed: authentication (to allow only teachers to edit the wiki and to make contents private or pub- lic) and the support of spreadsheet (OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel). In the second scenario, there are 4 professors and 90 stu- dents, organized in groups of 2 students each. The course is a practical one, which emcompasses the creation of a medium-sized web project, with database support. Each group has to deliver three progress reports over the semester, each targeted at a spe- cific phase of the project. These reports are written using the wiki tool available for that purpose, and the evaluation is also made online. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The following section presents the state of the art concerning wikis. The third sec- tion describes the survey that was conducted, its goal and structure, while fourth section presents the results that were achieved. Fifth section presents some conclusions that can be withdrawn from the survey results, and also points out some directions for future developments in wiki-based tools. 1 In the context of this article, a course is defined as a single topic, with the duration of an academic semester, and representing about one-fifth of the student’s workload. 1