The Benefits and Challenges of Developing Collaborative Writing Skills to Support Students’ Learning

While the 2008 Educause Horizon report states that collaboration webs and collective intelligence tools, such as wikis, are one of the key emergent technologies that are likely to enter the mainstream use in education within the next four years, the authors of the report also emphasise the critical challenge of providing formal instructions to students on “how to create meaningful content” with the new tools. The aim of this discussion paper is to start addressing this challenge, and in particular, to identify and discuss different skills and competences that are required for developing collaborative web content as well as various issues and challenges that are pertinent to collaborative authoring.