Wikis in group authoring

Noticeable shifts in style and grammar in a group-written paper can make it difficult reading. Further, a student may sometimes develop her assigned section in isolation from the rest of the paper, failing to build on what others have written. I’ve talked about these issues with students I have worked with. But until I picked someone else’s brain and found this page on wikis in education, I wasn’t sure how to make the collaborative writing process easier.

This is one way wikis can help. Students set up a wiki site for their drafts, with each student getting a page to write her assigned section in. After each section has been revised, say, two or three times, each student moves on to the next section and applies her revisions. She then moves on to the next section, and so forth. This may force each student to engage and build upon what others have written, as well as be committed to the overall focus and quality of the paper. Wikis smooth the workflow by eliminating the cumbersome process of emailing a Word document because several versions of the paper can be accessed via any Internet-connected computer. Wikis store a document’s history and allow “rollbacks” of changes — no messy strikethroughs and red fonts in Word’s “Track Changes” feature to deal with. I’d love to hear what others think of this process as well as any other thoughts on collaborative writing.