Knowledge generation and utilization in wiki supported teamwork – An experiment

Abstract

[EN] With the rapid advance of communication technologies and the free-flow of information, the concept of collaboration extends beyond physical locations and time zones in the form of virtual teams that are globally connected. This study considers how modern Web 2.0 based collaborative technologies (wikis) relate knowledge creation and utilization in student groups and aims to find out if these collaborative technologies are better suited to tasks requiring extensive asynchronous collaboration in an educational setting. To perform controlled experiments a sample of student teams that have worked in technologically and demographically diverse groups was selected, from which we had 49 experimental and 48 control teams with 193 and 192 participants respectively. We found that wiki technologies do not suit all kinds of tasks and do not always increase knowledge creation, knowledge maintenance, problem solving and thus knowledge utilization in team collaboration.