Effect of the Usage of Wikis onan Educational ContextPEDRO ABREU, DANIEL CASTRO SILVA, PEDRO MENDES, VASCO VINHAS

Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto and Artificial Intelligence and ComputerScience 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 theiracceptance 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 toseveral business and educational processes. However, up untilrecently, only computer experts, webdesigners, or individuals withhigh levels of knowledge regarding computers (the so calledpower users) were able to manage these kinds of web informa-tion repositories. This type of management consists fundamentallyin updating contents, publishing new ones, besides being able toperiodically redesign the web space’s structure. The issue has beenaddressed in the past few years where two notable success caseshave emerge.

One of the considered success cases is blogs. A blog is akind of hybrid diary where a person can periodically publish anarticle on any subject that he/she thinks that might be interestingto the blogosphere (community that supports blogs), and thosetopics may be commented by any person belonging to the blog’sspecific universe. This type of approach favors exchange of opinionbetween the publisher and the commenter.

Despite blogs usefulness, there are other areas where coop-erative and concurrent content creation is important. Wikis (thename comes from a Hawaiian word meaning quickness) representa good solution for these areas, as they consist summarily in a webpage editable through a web browser [1]. Having the possibilityto regularly update contents and immediately making them avail-able online is particularly useful for educational processes [2]. Inthis context, this article presents a study conducted in the secondsemester of the 2008/2009 academic calendar, having both stu-dents and teachers as test subjects. The goal of this study is tounderstand, 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 course1, provid-ing a cooperative platform for groups of students to develop theirwork. Consequently a survey, which structure and objectives arefurther exposed, was conducted in two distinct scenarios describednext.

In the course regarding the first scenario there are around15 teachers and 500 students. In a course of this dimensionthere 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 informationon the course like schedules, evaluation guidelines, bibliogra-phy, . . . For these purposes the chosen wiki engine was PmWikiwith some extra features installed: authentication (to allow onlyteachers to edit the wiki and to make contents private or pub-lic) and the support of spreadsheet (OpenOffice or MicrosoftExcel).

In the second scenario, there are 4 professors and 90 stu-dents, organized in groups of 2 students each. The course is apractical one, which emcompasses the creation of a medium-sizedweb project, with database support. Each group has to deliverthree progress reports over the semester, each targeted at a spe-cific phase of the project. These reports are written using the wikitool available for that purpose, and the evaluation is also madeonline.

The rest of this article is organized as follows. The followingsection 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. Fifthsection presents some conclusions that can be withdrawn fromthe survey results, and also points out some directions for futuredevelopments 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 aboutone-fifth of the student’s workload.

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STATE OF THE ART

In the year of 1995, Ward Cunningham created the first wiki engine,known as Wiki-WikiWeb [3]. At the time, the idea was very wellreceived as for the first time it was possible for the common user toedit and completely restructure a web site using only one’s browser,while maintaining its accessibility or, if possible, improving it2.This issue was addressed through the introduction of meaningfultopic association which consists in allowing the creation of pagelinks by simply writing their main topic in capital letters. Theselast features represent the base of every wiki engine, but as theconcept matured some other features were introduced. One of themost relevant is versioning which consists in saving through thewiki engine an edition log of every created page. By using it, ispossible to store by whom and when a page was edited and also torestore a previous version if the most recent updates were incorrect.To add expressiveness to the created pages file uploading featureswere also introduced, letting users to publish non-textual contentson a wiki. Later on the wiki engines introduced features to allowa direct visualization of images contents (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.)[4,5].

Although the features mentioned in the previous paragraphare enough to build a powerful wiki engine they do not attend topossible security problems, like users with malicious intents. Tocountermeasure this situation, engines now included authentica-tion characteristics, for instance the wiki administrator can restraintthe editability of a group of pages to a set of users that in most casesmay be defined both locally and remotely.

Since the first wiki appeared, other research groups startedto openly release their own version of the concept. Nowadaysmost wiki engines are freely downloadable and open source; mostof them run on Apache + PHP combination, although some pro-vide an installer with the server included. A large number of wikiengines also use other dynamic programming languages, such asPython, Perl, or Ruby. The most popular wiki engines accord-ing to [6] are MediaWiki, TikiWiki, DokuWiki (although thereare no official statistics for this particular problem). These threeengines are all PHP based and have very similar features; how-ever, the DokuWiki is the only one that does not require a databaseconnection.

Over the years, the population needs for information hasincreased with the growth and evolution of both societies and tech-nologies. Before the emergence of the internet, experts found inbooks and other article made publications the most effective wayto spread their knowledge. When the internet appeared with thepromise of ease of access and spread of decentralized informa-tion, some other issues became visible. One of those issues wasthe difficulty in publishing contents. Wikis offered the means tosolve this problem. Experts that trusted a certain wiki website couldpublish their knowledge (technical, scientific, cultural, and so on).Wikipedia is the most successful case in this context [7]. It worksas an online editable multi language encyclopedia with informa-tion on a huge number of topics published by many common usersscattered around the world. It was created in the beginning of 2001,and was initially thought to be the complement and feeder to anEnglish Language encyclopedia called NuPedia [8]. Nowadays ithas more than 2 million published articles, with many contain-ing additional multimedia information. A large part of the articles

2 Other attempts were made in the past but none of them was widelyaccepted and most of them required some level of technical knowledgeto work with.

is translated in around 250 different languages from English toChinese.

Other example of wiki’s applicability can be found on thedocumentation of open source software, as by using wiki the devel-opers can easily publish an online manual of their products. Anexample of this situation is the online manual of the tool usedto formulate the survey in which this research work is based [9].Wikis are also used to create web spaces for specific projects whereits creators intend to invite visitors to express themselves and thuscooperate in the development process [10] as can be seen in thisexample [11]. Aguiar and David [12] presents a way of using wikisfor documenting large software developments projects.

The use of software to support educational objectives, at sev-eral levels has long been discussed. In these contexts, many arethe tools that have been used by teaching institutions all over theworld. Some adopted the so called e-learning systems on a puremodel (exclusively passing knowledge through remote and digitalmeans) or a hybrid one (complement conventional classes withcontent publishing and for instance evaluation on the electronicsystem). According to Grainne Conole [13], e-learning systemsare divided into six categories, belonging one of the most popularsystems, Moodle, to several of them simultaneously.

In the past years wikis have been gradually ported to edu-cational contexts. They are a very valuable tool to support courseweb sites and to aid students to produce their regular reports, anddeliver their artifacts if applicable. Some studies have been con-ducted, such as [14–16] with some interesting results (even thoughthe first study divides results into two groups with as few as 16 and18 students in each, respectively, the second one collected only28 answers and the third collected 39 answers to the survey, butonly 17 and 22 students responded to two additional componentsof the study, respectively). In fact, some authors believe that wikismay have a fundamental role in what concerns the concept of auniversity [17].

SURVEY

A survey was envisioned in order to assess the actual use of wikitools in the educational context presented in first section. Thesurvey questionnaire has been divided into four areas, which aredetailed below.

– Sample characterization. This group of questions is intendedto characterize the individuals who responded to the sur-vey. Background and occupational information is collected,as well as demographical information. Age and gender wereconsidered enough to segment the sample, while education,occupation, and a self-assessment of informatics knowledgewere used for background information.

– Generic wiki information. This set of questions represents themajority of the survey, and is comprised of questions con-cerning the use of wiki-based tools, both at the personal andprofessional levels, allowing a comparison between these toolsand conventional ones used for similar purposes. Some ques-tions are dedicated to understanding the manner in whichwiki-based tools are used by the subjects. Another set of ques-tions is used to infer the use of different wiki engines whileone last set of questions were used to compare the use of wiki-based tools with others to understand how the subjects positionthe former in respect to the latter.

– Specific usage information. This set of questions is actuallydivided into two subgroups. The first is targeted at professorsand the second at students. Both subgroups have a small num-

THE USE OF WIKI TOOLS IN EDUCATION 3

ber of questions directed specifically at professors or students,and concerning the use of wiki-based tools at an academicenvironment. The set of questions directed at professors isintended to infer how wiki-based tools are accepted and usedin the context of a university course, both for publishing asupport web page and for grading assignments and reports,comparing them to other tools used for similar purposes. Theset of questions directed at students was designed to gatherinformation about the impact of the use of wiki-based tools insome courses, and the confidence the students have on thesewiki-based tools.

– Opinion questions. This group of questions allows the subjectsto express their opinions about wiki tools without restrictions.One question is focused on features that can be improved oradded to wiki-based tools in order to enhance their perfor-mance or acceptance as an everyday tool. A second questionasks the subject for feedback about the use of wiki-based tools,regarding both positive and negative aspects.

RESULTS

The survey was made available online (on their native language)and divulged to professors and students that are involved in coursesthat make use of a wiki-based tool. It was filled by a total of 12professors, 136 students and one nutritionist, totaling 149 validresponses. Two additional responses were not considered in thissection, since they were incomplete, and contained only informa-tion regarding one question. The nutritionist was considered anoutlier, and so not included in the results concerning either stu-dents or professors. The professors are between 24 and 48 yearsold, and the students are between 18 and 28 years old, with anaverage of 22 years. Twelve percent of the subjects were femalesand 88% males. The self-assessment on the level of knowledge inthe informatics area shows that two-thirds of the subjects possessabove-the-average knowledge and only <5% state that they havea below-the-average knowledge on the area.

Professors and Students

Regarding the use of wiki tools, several aspects were questioned.On one side, subjects were asked if the use they make of wiki toolsis at a professional or personal level. Results shown in Table 1suggest that the majority of students and all professors use wikitools at a professional level.

Another objective was to assess if they were compelled touse these tools, or if they did so on their own free will. The resultsare displayed in Table 2, with an equivalent percentage of subjectsstating the obligation to use wiki tools and subjects affirming theuse of these tools on their own initiative. Also, one can see that thereis a large number of subjects that have answered both obligationand free will.

Table 1 Professional Versus Personal Use

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsProfessional use 109 79.56Personal use 58 42.34

ProfessorsProfessional use 12 100.00Personal use 1 8.33

Table 2 Obligation Versus Free Will

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsObligation 92 67.15Free will 91 66.42

ProfessorsObligation 8 66.67Free will 7 58.33

Table 3 Wiki Usage

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsConsultation 114 83.21Edition 72 52.55Creation 57 41.61

ProfessorsConsultation 12 100.00Edition 10 83.33Creation 2 16.67

Another facet that was under scrutiny was the kind of usagethat was made of wiki tools, regarding creation, edition and con-sultation of information. As can be seen in Table 3, most subjectssay that they access wikis for consultation, and only a smaller, yetvery significative percentage report the use of these wiki tools forcreation and edition of contents.

The final dimension that was analyzed respecting the use ofwiki tools was meant to assess if the cooperative facet of wikitools was actually put to use. Table 4 shows that the majority ofthe subjects use wiki tools in a collaborative environment, but stillabout one-third of the students use these tools at an individuallevel.

In the case of the use of wiki tools for creation or editionof contents, the periodicity of that action was asked. As can beseen from Table 5, approximately a third of the students update thecontents two to three times a week, and the other two-thirds are dis-tributed evenly through the remaining answers. Professors presenta less frequent periodicity of content update, with the majorityindicating weekly or even less frequent updates.

The next question was designed to assess the level of com-mitment of the subjects to wiki tools, by verifying if they possess apersonal wiki-based page. As can be seen in Table 6, the majorityof the subjects do not have a personal wiki-based page, with only20 students and 1 professor answering positively.

Closely related to the previous question, Table 7 shows theresults of the survey regarding the motivations behind the choiceof a wiki-based tool for the construction of a personal page. Ascan be seen, the easiness of edition of such pages is the main

Table 4 Group Versus Individual

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsIndividual 45 32.85Group 88 64.23

ProfessorsIndividual 2 16.67Group 11 91.67

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Table 5 Update Periodicity

Answer Count Percentage

Several times a day 16 11.68Daily 23 16.79Students 2 or 3 Times a week 41 29.93Weekly 16 11.68Less frequently 14 10.22Several times a day 1 8.33Daily 0 0Professors 2 or 3 times a week 2 16.67Weekly 4 33.33Less frequently 5 41.67

Table 6 Wiki Homepage

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsYes 20 14.60No 117 85.40

ProfessorsYes 1 8.33No 11 91.67

reason pointed out by the subjects, followed by the easiness of fileupload, and the possibilities of access and version control provided,and also format maintenance. One subject provided an additionalreason for the choice of a wiki tool, the easiness of navigation.

The subsequent question is related to the wiki engine that isused by the subjects. As can be seen in Table 8 students use primar-ily DokuWiki, while professors use also DokuWiki, but primarilyPMWiki. A number of students also filled in another engine, but abrief analysis on those answers reveals that seven of those answersare “don’t know/don’t use” and five answered Wikipedia, whichcorresponds to the MediaWiki engine.

Still regarding wiki engines, the following question analyzedthe level of difficulty in the transition between different engines(from a user perspective). Table 9 shows that only a very small per-centage of students stated that the transition was hard or very hard,with the majority saying that the transition was easy. The resultsof this question in respect to the professors are not shown herebecause there are not enough answers that allow for conclusionsto be drawn.

The following questions are intended to compare the accep-tance of wiki tools as collaborative tools. Table 10 shows thatabout 50% of both students and professors elect wiki tools astheir favorite collaboration tool. However, while students electMicrosoft Word and GoogleDoc as their second best tools, repre-senting 32% and 23% of the choices, respectively, professors electMicrosoft Word alongside wiki tool, also with 50%, and LaTeX

Table 7 Why a Wiki Homepage

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsEasy of edition 18 88.70File upload 11 54.20Version control 5 24.64Access control 7 34.49Format maintenance 5 24.64Other 1 4.93

Table 8 Wiki Engine

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsMediaWiki 25 18.25Twiki 11 8.03PMWiki 24 17.52Dokuwiki 70 51.09Other 11 8.03

ProfessorsMediaWiki 0 0Twiki 2 16.67PMWiki 8 66.67DokuWiki 5 41.67Other 1 8.33

Table 9 Wiki Engine Transition Difficulty

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsNo answer 90 67.15Very easy 5 3.65Easy 28 20.44Medium 11 8.03Hard 1 0.73Very hard 0 0

and GoogleDoc are the second best tool, with 25% of the voteseach. Two of the “other” answers indicate Notepad++ as theirfavorite collaborative tool.

The following question tries to assess the perspective of theusers regarding the productivity that is achieved with wiki tools,when compared to other tools. Table 11 shows that students con-sider the productivity of wiki tools to be equal or higher that othertools, while professors consider it to be identical or somewhatinferior.

The subsequent question evaluates another aspect of wikitools, when compared to other tools, the presentation. A briefanalysis of Table 12 shows that the majority of both students andprofessors consider it to be identical. However, while the remain-der of professors considers the presentation of wiki tools inferior,when compared to other tools, students are almost equally dividedbetween inferior and superior presentation.

Table 10 Favorite Collaboration Tool

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsWiki 63 45.99Word 44 32.12LaTeX 7 5.11OpenOffice 8 5.84GoogleDoc 31 22.63Other 3 2.19

ProfessorsWiki 6 50.00Word 6 50.00LaTeX 3 25.00OpenOffice 1 8.33GoogleDoc 3 25.00Other 1 8.33

THE USE OF WIKI TOOLS IN EDUCATION 5

Table 11 Wiki Tools Productivity

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsNo answer 6 4.38Much inferior 5 3.65Inferior 9 6.57Identical 60 43.80Superior 56 40.88Much superior 1 0.73

ProfessorsNo answer 0 0Much inferior 2 16.67Inferior 3 25.00Identical 7 58.33Superior 0 0Much superior 0 0

Table 12 Wiki Tools Presentation

Answer Count Percentage

StudentsNo answer 8 5.84Much inferior 6 4.38Inferior 32 23.36Identical 62 45.26Superior 27 19.71Much superior 2 1.46

ProfessorsNo answer 0 0Much inferior 0 0Inferior 4 33.33Identical 7 58.33Superior 0 0Much superior 1 8.33

Professor-Oriented Results

The next two questions were answered only by professors. Thefirst question tries to determine the favorite tool for the creation ofa website to hold the contents of a course, and act as an interfacewith the students. Table 13 shows that wiki tools are the favoritekind of tools, but still a considerable number of professors preferother tools, such a simple text editor, or a more professional tool,like Adobe Dreamweaver. The four “other” answers are all distinct,referring Moodle, Sharepoint, Amaya, and one referring wiki toolsin the case of a course with many professors. A question was alsomade regarding the reasons for choosing a wiki-based tool for thecreation of a course support website. The answers were percentu-ally similar to the ones shown in Table 7, with the exception of fileupload, which was considered at the same level as version controland format maintenance.

Table 13 Favorite Tool for WebPage Creation

Answer Count Percentage

Wiki 6 50.00Frontpage 2 16.67Dreamweaver 3 25.00Text editor 4 33.33Other 4 33.33

Table 14 Support for Assignments Evaluation

Answer Count Percentage

Wiki 3 25.00Paper 7 58.33PDF or similar 8 66.67Other 1 8.33

This second question is targeted at the evaluation of assign-ments, and, as Table 14 shows, only a small number of professorsactually prefers wiki-based tools, with the majority favoring a sin-gle electronic document or a hard copy. The “other” answer statesthat is dependant of the type of assignment, but usually prefers asingle electronic document.

Student-Oriented Results

The next three questions were answered only by students. The firstquestion tried to determine the size of the workgroup (many stu-dents use wiki tools as part of a group, as seen in Table 4). Theresults, shown in Figure 1, suggest that the majority of subjects usewikis in small groups (The X-axis represents the number of per-sons per group and the Y-axis represents the number of responses).There is, however, a significant percentage of subjects that usewikis in medium-sized groups.

Related to the previous questions, is the following one,regarding the use of wiki tools in larger groups. As shown inTable 15, the majority of the subjects consider that, in larger groups,the use of a collaborative tool, such as a wiki tool, would presentbenefits.

Finally, the subsequent question was intended to assess thelevel of confidence that students have in assignment submissionthrough wiki tools (such as a synchronization of the students’ workto a non-editable area). As can be seen through the results shown inTable 16, the confidence indicated by students is medium to high.

As mentioned in the previous section, two additional devel-opment questions were included in the survey, so that the subjectscould freely express their opinion about wiki tools. In the firstquestions, users were asked about aspects that could be improvedin this kind of tools, while the second one was completely free.Twenty-five subjects filled in with improvement requests, and only16 submitted some kind of general comments about wiki tools. Arecurring feature, which is mentioned in 14 answers to the firstquestion, is the easiness of edition. The subjects think that a moreuser-friendly WYSIWYG edition mode could be provided, so thatthe edition could be more similar to other tools, like MicrosoftWord, among others. Another recurrent feature (seven answers) isthe final result, in what regards to the visual aspect. These sub-jects consider the generated webpages to be all too similar, and thepossibility to associate a CSS to each page is suggested. Finally,there are four features that are mentioned by one or two subjects,which are a better support for dealing with concurrent editions onthe same page, the possibility to present a list of recent changessince the last time the user visited a specific page, the prospectof automatically generating indexes, and navigation links betweenpages at the same hierarchical level, and finally the possibility toexport the content of the page to other formats, such as pdf, doc,odt, and others.

General comments submitted by the subjects do not havemuch content besides the already mentioned above. Some subjectspoint out the easiness of use of these tools, and the swift speed at

6 ABREU ET AL.

Figure 1 Group size.

Table 15 Wiki Tool Impact for Large Groups

Answer Count Percentage

No answer 58 42.34Irrelevant 6 4.38Relative 35 25.55High 38 27.74

Table 16 Confidence in Submitting Assignments

Answer Count Percentage

No answer 45 32.85Very low 3 2.19Low 4 2.92Medium 43 31.39High 38 27.74Very high 4 2.92

which a page can be created and edited, as well as its suitability asa collaborative tool, for use in groups.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this section, some of the most important conclusions, withdrawnfrom the study shown above, are presented and justified as well asfuture work areas are identified.

Before going deeper into results’ analysis, one must pointthe most significant study’s idiosyncrasies in order to make theconclusions generalizable or, in some cases, constrained to a

specific context and application domain. One of the most impor-tant aspects of the survey was the academic environment inwhat it was conducted as practically the totality of the personsenquired were professors or computer science students or evenelectrical engineering students. This sample, as it is depicted inthe previous section, led to extremely high levels of technologyknowledge what prevents full scale and immediate transposi-tion of conclusions to a wider universe. Also exploiting the testdomain specificity—University’s classes, subjects, students, andprofessors—one shall point out that the exposition to the technol-ogy and wiki-based systems was not only encouraged, in somecases, but it was mandatory for the majority—such as assignmentsand classes’ content access.

Once this preliminary contextualization features summaryis described, it is possible to begin extracting conclusion fromthe results gathered and already presented. This analysis isconducted in two steps. First, the most positive technologyoutcome is depicted and later the negative points are pre-sented alongside the correspondent proposed perspectives ofimprovement.

Considering Tables 1 and 2, one relevant conclusion is that,although for the great majority of the subjects the usage of wikisbeing mandatory, more than 40% of students state that they useit for personal use and two-thirds also as free will. Surprisingly,professors, that impose the use of wiki in their subjects, practicallydo not use the technology for other purposes; many only do it byobligation.

Another important conclusion is that, as depicted inTable 3, most of the users use wiki-generated pages to consultinformation—also a great part of them use it to edit and createcontent—showing that this kind of systems allow the creation and

THE USE OF WIKI TOOLS IN EDUCATION 7

maintenance of interesting and actual content, thus generating highlevels of access. As a consequence of its nature the following tablealso shows that the vast majority of the users tend to use the technol-ogy in groups rather than just for individual motivation, enhancingthe use of its collaborative features.

In Table 5, it is patent that this kind of systems, greatlyimprove content actuality as more than half of the students statethat they update contents at a frequency higher than once a week.Once again, it is the professors’ group that tends to use the sys-tem temporally in a more spaced way. These results reaffirm theconclusion that wiki-based webpages tend to have more updatedmaterial and therefore increasing its interest and access levels.

One key positive aspect that rebounded from this survey, wasthe extremely high levels of confidence concerning file manage-ment, version and access control and format maintenance as thenumbers in Table 7 show. These numbers are even more impressiveas they came from experienced and advanced users and are deeplyconfirmed by the data presented in Table 16.

Perhaps one of the most interesting outcome is the certain lackof agreement between students and professors, in what concernsto wiki tools in both presentation and productivity levels, whencompared to other approaches. Table 11 shows that while the over-whelming majority of students consider wiki tools productivity tobe identical or superior to other tools, the majority of professorsconsiders it to be identical or inferior. Table 12 shows that abouthalf of the students consider the pages generated through wiki tech-nology to have a similar presentation and style when compared toother tools, while about one quarter of students consider it to besuperior and another quarter consider it inferior. The majority ofprofessors, on the other hand, consider it to be identical or inferior.An interesting result is the correlation between presentation andproductivity from the students’ perspective—a correlation matrixtest performed on the answers to both questions (see Tables 11and 12) provides a result of 0.77. This correlation, however, doesnot seem to be present when considering the teachers’ perspective(correlation value of 0.006).

Regarding the negative features, one that must be referredand can also be interpreted as a positive one, is the almost com-plete transparency to end-users of the technology. Although, inits essence, this feature tends to be interpreted as positive, thereis a significant collateral effect that resides in the prevention ofthe technology’s full-scale exploit and usage, even for advancedend-users, as they do not know the system’s capabilities. This lim-itation is well visible in Table 13 as although the existence of theprevious features, a very significant part of users, both studentsand professors, still state that their favorite tool for collaborativework is a standard offline or even online office regular application.This fact can also be due to the relative lack of dissemination ofwikis in a wider global domain.

Considering Table 8, the non-standardization of a global wikiengine is also a downside of this—relative immature—technologyas users disperse themselves through a wide number of wikiengines without great knowledge of them. This choice is merelydone taking into account contextualization issues such as third-party recommendations and classes’ rules. This lack of standardsmakes visible the most important limitation of this kind of systemsthat resides in the difficulty to migrate data and format betweendifferent engines and its intrinsic learning curve. Even advancedend-users, such as our sample, have stated that transition betweenengines is not trivial as Table 9 illustrates. These numbers arebelieved to be much less positive if one takes into account tra-ditional computer users. One must conclude that there is a strong

need to promote tag uniformization and language standards so thatcomplete system migration becomes realistically feasible.

Regarding both the positive and negative features withdrawnfrom this survey, one ought to affirm that in a very short timeperiod, wikis proved their point and imposed themselves as asolid technology recognizable and elected for a significant par-cel of users. Nevertheless, while consult operations are extremelyimplanted, full-extended system capabilities are still to be com-pletely exploited by traditional users. It is needed a strong effortby the community to deliver a global standard concerning tag andlanguage definition and support as well as a more visible featurespresentation. Also needed is a better WYSIWYG editing supportcloser to traditional office tools, so that less advanced end-usersare able to extensively use this technology. In spite of these futurework areas, the path already taken by wikis is really impressive asthere is a strong conviction from the users that it is an excellent plat-form for collaborative work, enhancing productivity levels withoutcompromising the final product presentation and format and simul-taneously adding extra features such as version and access controlfor free.

REFERENCES

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BIOGRAPHIES

Pedro Abreu has a five-year degree in Informat-ics Engineering from the Faculty of Engineeringat the University of Porto (FEUP), Portugal, wherehe is currently a PhD student. His interests include(but are not limited to) Artificial Intelligence, andhis PhD thesis is focused on the use of simulationsoccer environments in order to improve soccerteam performances. He was a guest lecturer atFEUP for two years, and has published over tenpapers in the past two years.

Daniel Castro Silva has a five-year degree inInformatics Engineering from the Faculty of Engi-neering at the University of Porto (FEUP), Portu-gal, where he is currently a PhD student. Duringthe course he was awarded with four merit awards(granted to the top ten students of all courses).His interests include (but are not limited to) Arti-ficial Intelligence, and his PhD thesis is on the useof simulation environments as a platform for thedevelopment and test of coordination methodolo-

gies for the execution of joint operations (such as search and rescue orsurveillance operations) by a team of autonomous agents. He was a guestlecturer at FEUP for two years, and has published over ten papers in thepast two years.

Pedro Mendes has a five-year degree in Informat-ics Engineering from the Faculty of Engineeringat the University of Porto (FEUP), Portugal. Hisinterests include Software Engineering and Soft-ware Tests. He was a guest lecturer at FEUP fortwo years, and has published over five papers inthe past three years.

Vasco Vinhas has a five-year degree in Informat-ics Engineering from the Faculty of Engineeringat the University of Porto (FEUP), Portugal, wherehe is currently a PhD student. During the course hewas awarded with four consecutive merit awards(granted to the top ten students of all courses) anoustanding UP Merit Distinction award, uniqueedition; and an Honorable Mention for his workon "Stamps Problem" by the Portuguese Math-ematics National Society. His interests include

Affective Computing, Automatic Emotion Assessment and Immersive Dig-ital Environments and his PhD thesis is on real-time dynamic multimediastoryline based on online audience biometric information. He was a guestlecturer at FEUP for two years, and has published over twenty papers inthe past three years.