The original web, the Read Web, was made up of pages grouped into websites. The websites were static, hand coded and hard to change. Technical skills were also needed to build up a website. Today, the web has been transformed into the "Read-Write Web", known as Web 2.0 which empowers for the users and visitors with a new stage of customization, communication, participation and collaboration (Solomon & Schrum, 2007). The emergence of Web 2.0 is not only a technological revolution, but also a social revolution (Dowen, 2005) because web 2.0 tools change the nature of web from distributed to participatory.
Some researcher states that this emergence is the potential to enhance the teaching and learning environment in education (Ajjan & Hartshorne, 2008). As this stated, web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasts and file sharing services are getting more and more popular because they allow users to create, publish and share web contents. Especially, we will target on wikis that can support collaborative learning in which learners actively involve with their own construction of knowledge.
Wikis are innovated web sites that allow users to read, write, edit and share web pages without knowing technical skills. User can link keywords within a document to existing or new documents which allow the growth of wiki pages. Editing privileges may also be extended to all users to the wiki sites or restricted to selected users. Due to the technical ease of use and regular use of students (Hughes & Narayan, 2009), university instructors have begun to use wikis to support learning and collaboration by employing such tasks collaborative writing, glossaries, discussion and review, group projects, reflection journals and assessments (Ben-Zvi, 2007). To keep the appropriate content in the wikis, usage guidelines, tracking, and authentication mechanisms are important (Augar et al, 2004). The researchers discovered that wikis features were helpful all students complete their assignments satisfactorily. Therefore, Wikis are considered as a potential Web 2.0 technology that "enable user to develop web content collaboratively in an open, public and participatory manner" (Alexander 2006, Jenkins, 2006).
In this context, collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people form a group, contribute in group discussion and solve the problems together until they accomplish the specific goal by contributing individual knowledge on the wiki websites. According to Veldhuis-Diermanse's suggestion, students can criticize their work and other students' contributions in a setting of collaborative learning (Veldhuis-Diermanse, 2006). As the result of usefulness and benefit, several researchers are beginning to explore the potential of wikis use. Forte (2006) also suggests researcher to study a set of target wiki practices and associated social environment(s) to be more meaningful and valuable.
The study concentrates on the perception of wiki use and collaboration in the wiki among postgraduate students from NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
PROBLEM STATEMENT AND JUSTIFICATION
As a result of technology evolution, people's perceptions for the use of the Internet, the way information is organized on the web (Leung & Chu, 2009) and the way people communicate on the web are being transformed. In the paper of Hughes and Narayan, they found that even though some participants accepted that development of group pages really promoted collaboration and knowledge sharing, others still perceived the wikis as a publishing tool (Hughes & Narrayan, 2009). Besides, Leung and Chu observed that wiki is as a publishing tool than a collaborative tool (Leung & Chu, 2009). Thus, it is required to clarify students' perception of wiki in the process of collaborative learning.
At present, wikis are more popular and useful for students' collaborative learning when they perform their projects or assignment. We really want to take more educational research to make clear the specific benefits from wikis so that we can contribute to the collaborative learning in relative to education. To inquiry in this area, our study will conduct for the purpose of exploring student's perception regarding the usability and effectiveness of wikis use, and it will also examine the benefit of collaboration in wikis for student content learning, by observing the wiki use in group project among postgraduate students.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE
It is intention of our research to investigate the perception of Wiki use and the benefit of using wiki in Collaborative learning. The following questions are examined in this study.
Research Questions:
1. How do students use wiki as supportive of peer collaboration?
2. How may collaboration in wiki facilitate students' content learning in group projects?
SCOPE OF RESEARCH
This study is a case study of postgraduate students who are using wiki for their group project in Professional Seminar (PS) at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. The Professional Seminar is a compulsory course that is offered to new masters students enrolled in the division of information studies each years. It is deployed on edveNTUre, which is an e-learning system used by 23,000 NTU students and 3000 professors, around 1600 courses are offered through it each term.PS utilizes several edveNTUre components to facilitate online collaboration among students. The asynchronous nature of online collaboration affords the students flexibility to pace their time and length of interaction.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The empirical study will involve surveys, interviews and other observational methods. The research is conducted in the following few steps:
Questionnaire Survey: A questionnaire survey is planned to examine the perception of wiki use and collaboration in the Wiki among postgraduate students from NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
Face-to-face Interview: The survey shall be in a combination of face-to-face interview and distribution of questionnaire.
Data will be gathered and analyzed to produce the empirical supports to validate or invalidate the hypothesis. Data collected from questionnaire survey and face-to-face interview shall be entered in the SPSS statistical software package for in-depth statistical investigation.
RESOURCE REQUIREMENT
Overall Project Schedule
No
Phases
Start Date and Finish Date
Total Duration
1
CI Proposal
Aug 30 2010 to Sep 17 2010
19 days
2
Survey, Data Collection and Analysis
Sep 20 2010 to Oct 12 2010
22 days
3
Report Preparation
Oct 13 2010 to Nov 30 2010
18 days
4
Presentation Preparation
Dec 01 2010 to Dec 06 2010
6 days
5
Final Report Submission
Dec 07 2010 to Dec 20 2010
13 days
