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This study aimed to examine whether the use of wiki-systems in healthcare internship courses that adopt a problem-based learning approach may have significant influences on the relationships among students' relationship commitment, knowledge-sharing behavior and perceived problem-based learning performance in the context of higher education.

This study adopted a quasi-experimental approach. Cross-sectional survey data collected from 187 undergraduate students in Taiwan were used for the data analysis procedures. The students in the experimental group used wiki-systems and a set of information and communication technologies as learning tools, while the students in the control group used the same set of information and communication technologies only. The statistical techniques of independent t-tests and component-based structural equation modeling were adopted to examine the research hypotheses.

The results reveal significant differences between the experimental and control groups concerning relationship commitment, knowledge-sharing behavior, independent study and active participation. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups regarding group interaction and reasoning skills. Additionally, all the hypotheses regarding the relationships among constructs were supported.

Wiki-systems have unique features that can enhance the effectiveness of problem-based learning activities. This study is among the first to investigate how wiki-systems may affect the effectiveness of problem-based learning processes by investigating the relationships among healthcare students' relationship commitment, knowledge-sharing behavior and perceived problem-based learning performance. The results of this study can advance the current understanding of the effectiveness of wiki-based problem-based learning in the context of healthcare education.

This empirical paper aims to assess how social media can foster workplace learning within a globally dispersed project environment. In general, there are few studies on the use of social media in organizations, and many of these emphasize on issues related to knowledge transfer. Although learning traditionally has been as acquisition of knowledge, increasingly researchers point to learning-as-participation occurring through work collaboration. Social media promise increased opportunities for communication and collaboration, extending the context of collaboration beyond the local setting. However, there exists limited research on how social media can foster workplace learning, for example, between globally dispersed colleagues.

The study is based on an exploratory, in-depth single case study of an international professional service firm’s implementation of an internal wiki system to address the research question: how are social media utilized in an organization to foster workplace learning among its dispersed individual experts? Data are gathered in 35 semi-structured interviews, as well as documents studies and observations. Data are coded and analyzed utilizing the context and learning factors of workplace learning.

The paper shows how the wiki system enables hybrid knowledge management strategies linked to virtual collaboration on daily project tasks, involving documentation, search, interaction and knowledge exchange, as well as socialization and learning from practice among dispersed groups and individuals. The learning mechanisms involved in virtual collaboration do not differ much from what is reported on face-to-face workplace learning, however, the context factors are extended beyond the local setting.

The findings identify four determinants for using the wiki that can be of use to other organizations implementing similar virtual collaboration technology. First, the wiki must directly relate to the daily work by offering interactive and updated information concerning current project challenges. Second, the system must enable transparency in the daily project work to allow search. Third, the intention with the search is of lesser degree to identify encyclopedic information than it is to visualize individual competence. Fourth, the quality assurance of the data posted at the wiki is important.

The study reveals how an international knowledge-based organization can utilize social media to leverage knowledge and experiences from multiple geographically dispersed projects by enabling virtual collaboration. Extant empirical research on workplace learning emphasizes on face-to-face interactions in groups, for example, when engineers, or accountants, in teams interact and collaborate at client premises. However, there exists limited knowledge concerning how workplace learning can be achieved through virtual collaboration.

Wiki is a new form of information production and organization, which has become one of the most important knowledge resources. In recent years, with the increase of users in wikis, “free rider problem” has been serious. In order to motivate editors to contribute more to a wiki system, it is important to fully understand their contribution behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore the law of dynamic contribution behavior of editors in wikis.

After developing a dynamic model of contribution behavior, the authors employed both the metrological and clustering methods to process the time series data. The experimental data were collected from Baidu Baike, a renowned Chinese wiki system similar to Wikipedia.

There are four categories of editors: “testers,” “dropouts,” “delayers” and “stickers.” Testers, who contribute the least content and stop contributing rapidly after editing a few articles. After editing a large amount of content, dropouts stop contributing completely. Delayers are the editors who do not stop contributing during the observation time, but they may stop contributing in the near future. Stickers, who keep contributing and edit the most content, are the core editors. In addition, there are significant time-of-day and holiday effects on the number of editors’ contributions.

By using the method of time series analysis, some new characteristics of editors and editor types were found. Compared with the former studies, this research also had a larger sample. Therefore, the results are more scientific and representative and can help managers to better optimize the wiki systems and formulate incentive strategies for editors.

The purpose of this paper is to define standard guidelines for the development of a wiki collaboration space for e-Learning, in order to provide collaborative activities among students, and between instructors and students.

The general requirements and extended features of wiki collaboration space were determined by conducting a requirement study and discussion with major stakeholders, i.e. students and tutors. Then, the wiki collaboration space was developed based on an open source wiki system. Finally, a wiki collaboration space was evaluated in terms of usability and collaboration effectiveness.

A comparison was performed between the wiki collaboration space and the original wiki in students’ works in an online course. The results showed that the effectiveness of collaboration and usefulness of wiki collaboration space were higher than original wiki in collaborative assignment.

As for practical implications, e-Learning developers/managers can use the outcome of this study as a guideline to integrate wiki and/or other social software to supplement e-Learning systems for better collaboration.

There is a need to define standard guidelines that provide the necessary features for wiki in e-Learning. In this study, extended features of wiki as collaborative learning tool were identified and evaluated to meet the needs of students in e-Learning environment.

This paper intends to present and discuss the findings of a case study analysis of the adoption and use of a wiki system by a small enterprise that is intended as a tool for managing the knowledge needed to successfully perform its business activities. The study aims at contributing to the still insufficient research on the factors influencing the use of new Web 2.0 technologies in small organisations to support internal knowledge management.

The study combines a qualitative and quantitative approach. The main unit of analysis is the wiki system of a small company, particularly its implementation and usage by the company’s employees. Relevant information about the wiki was collected through six interviews to different company members, and by means of an online survey submitted to almost all employees. Interviews involved the CEO of the company, the system developers and two typical users. The survey was made through a questionnaire of 19 questions online administered by means of a popular free-access online poll website (freeonlinesurveys.com).

Through the reconstruction of the history of the system, the study allowed to understand how the wiki has been introduced and is effectively used inside the case company. The findings of the study highlight that the wiki technology, being light and user-friendly, can be particularly suited for small companies. At the same time, they reveal that the successful implementation of such a system is not a spontaneous and automatic result, but requires a resolute support by top management, a good motivation of participating employees and a clear definition of purposes and ways of use.

The findings of the study contribute both to the academic research, by making available to scholars further empirical evidence about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in small organisations, and to the practice, by providing some guidelines to managers of small companies who are attempting to adopt and use wikis to effectively manage their knowledge assets.

The paper contributes to the limited research about the adoption and use of wikis as knowledge management system, both in general and in the particular case of a SME. Furthermore, by investigating the behaviours and opinions of individual knowledge workers, it takes into account a perspective that the literature has so far neglected.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the underpinning dynamics that explain collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence can be understood as the capacity of a collective system to evolve toward higher order complexity through networks of individual capacities. The authors observed two collective systems as examples of the dynamic processes of complex networks – the wiki course PeSO at the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, and an agent-based model inspired by wiki systems.

The results of the wiki course PeSO and the model are contrasted with a random network baseline model. Both the wiki course and the model show dynamics of accumulation, in which statistical properties of non-equilibrium networks appear.

The work is based on network science. The authors analyzed data from two kinds of networks: the wiki course PeSO and an agent-based model. Limitations due to the number of computations and complexity appeared when there was a high order of magnitude of agents.

Better understanding can allow for the measurement and design of systems based on collective intelligence.

The results show how collective intelligence emerges from cumulative dynamics.

Wiki forms a new model of virtual collaboration. The original wiki is designed to hide content authorship information. Such design may hinder users from being aware of task conflict, resulting in low-efficient conflict management and decreased group performance. This study aims at increasing users' awareness of task conflict to facilitate wiki-based collaboration.

A visual feedback dialog box is designed to increase users' awareness of task conflict. A survey-based comparative study is conducted by using original wiki and modified wiki (the new design). A total of 301 participants are invited. Structural equation model (SEM) is used to analyze survey data.

Most users are willing to solve conflict issues, and the dialog box can increase users' awareness of task conflict. Conflict awareness can promote user's participation, gain better conflict resolution and improve group performance. The dialog box can enhance the influence of conflict awareness on user participation and conflict resolution, but reduce the influence of conflict awareness on group performance.

Only undergraduate students are invited, some typical variables are not included. The design needs improvement.

A new wiki tool is designed. The influence of conflict awareness is explored while previous studies largely ignore this variable.

In collaborative settings, such as research and development projects, obtaining the maximum benefit from knowledge management systems depends on the ability of the different partners to understand the conceptualisation underlying the system’s knowledge organisation. This paper aims to show how information/knowledge organisation in a multi-organisation project can be made more effective if the domain experts are involved in the specification of the systems semantic structure. A particular aspect is further studied: the role of conceptual relations in the process of collaborative development of such structures.

An action-research approach was adopted, framed by a socio-semantic stance. A collaborative conceptual modelling platform was used to support the members of a research and development project in the process of developing a lightweight ontology aiming at reorganising all the project information in a wiki system. Data collection was carried out by means of participant observation, interviews and a questionnaire.

The approach to solve the content organisation problem revealed to be effective both in the result and the process. It resulted in a better-organised system, enabling more efficient project information retrieval. The collaborative development of the lightweight ontology embodied, in fact, a learning process, leading to a shared conceptualisation. The research results point to the importance of the elicitation of conceptual relations for structuring the project’s knowledge. These results are important for the design of methods and tools to support the collaborative development of conceptual models.

This paper studies the social process leading to a shared conceptualisation, a subject that has not been sufficiently researched. This case study provides evidence about the importance of the early phases of the construction of ontologies, mainly if domain experts are deeply involved, supported by appropriated tools and guided by well-structured processes.

This paper aims to collect the terminologies from the Ministry of National Defense military dictionary and to design a military-based wiki system, TMTpedia, to serve as a collaborative and sharing platform for military personnel.

The development of the system is based on a prototype design and case illustration. The framework of the Taiwan Military Terminology Wikipedia system (TMTpedia) consists of three major subsystems, namely, Military Terminology Dictionary Processing, Military Article Contents Extension and Military Article and Resource Recommendation. This paper applies the engines of MediaWiki to design the proposed TMTpedia, and embedded different functions into a variety of system modules are developed by using such tools as C#, Java and SQL Server.

In this demonstration, the focus is on the topics of “Communications, Electronics and Information Operations” that are illustrative of cases that reveal the results of the TMTpedia system.

The main contributions of this paper are to transform military terminologies from a traditional dictionary into Wiki-based platform that can provide a reference framework for knowledge collaboration, to extend the content on the TMTpedia system from an external knowledge encyclopedia to an extensible mechanism that can renew military concepts for the accuracy of knowledge sharing and transformation and to implement a recommendation model into the TMTpedia system that dynamically provides relevant military information from external resources to enhance the effectiveness of knowledge acquisition.

This paper aims to understand the current state and challenges of deploying collaborative applications in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Germany.

A survey of 101 SMEs in Germany showed how intensively collaborative applications are used today and the positive and negative effects associated with their use. Analyses proved correlations between the use of collaborative applications, the need for cooperation within SMEs and the effects and benefits of their use.

The company representatives surveyed reported a positive balance of their pro and con experiences with collaborative applications. The use of collaborative applications closely interacts with work-related demands: the more complex the requirements of joint action, the broader the benefits and challenges are of their use. The data also revealed three gaps between demand of cooperation and use of specific applications, supporting the argument that implementation of collaborative applications is challenging for SMEs. A successful use requires major changes in work systems and culture of the company.

The data of the survey are not representative of the population of SMEs in Germany.

These empirical findings contribute a unique as well as substantive view of today’s state of digitalisation of project communication and management within SMEs, specifically their deployment of collaborative software.