A considerable component of online collaborative spaces for students is user experience and utility of the forums. The article identifies an increase of student group contributions in the wiki forum as compared to the threaded discussion. Further, there were more expansion, deletion and content-editing and formation in the wiki. This observation suggests that wikis support co-writing. Yet, groups produced more discussion postings in the forum, compared to the wiki. However, the content of the students' discourse in terms of collaboration, complexity, monitoring and planning were similar. The forum writers were more verbose and the wiki entries were more condensed. Wiki Collaborative articles proved to be easier for students, seeing that they started days earlier than the forum. The article concluded that wiki collaborative discussions were better at facilitating problem based discussions.
An important consideration for future scholastic discussion venues is to consider the psychology of making online forum writing useful and fun. Gamification has caught the attention of education apps designers. Gamification involves the integration of addictive game like elements into an app to make the user interface more engaging. I think we need to reexamine how learning can happen on collaborative online forums integrated with gamified engagement components.
Douglas, do you have some specific ideas of how gamification could be used, in particular, with regard to wikis and forums? What kinds of elements would make the user interface more engaging? What kinds of elements would make writing more addictive? Can/should gamification principles be applied to all types of tech tools or apps? Just curious about some concrete ideas about why gamification is so appealing.
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