Collaborative Wiki-Writing for Engineers. Fun or Failure?

In a technical writing course for Molecular Science and Technology students of Delft University of Technology, writing groups were asked to write their research reports in a wiki. This way, the lecturers could monitor the students’ progress and the number of versions of each document was brought down to one. However, the students were not very positive about this way of writing collaboratively. To find out which requirements have to be met to incorporate writing in wikis more successfully in engineering writing education, a survey was held about the students’ attitude towards writing in a wiki. From this survey and from background literature about wikis in engineering, it becomes clear which requirements have to be fulfilled: firstly, students need to be familiarized more intensively with the technical aspects of writing in wikis. Furthermore, the advantages of wikis for collaboration and text management should be pointed out to them in more detail. Finally, writing in a wiki should resemble the writing in a familiar word processing program as much as possible. For feedback purposes, the wiki should contain reviewing options.