Wikis are an excellent platform for team collaboration, especially in today's climate of distance learning, transcontinental collaboration, and busy schedules. Although the new technology may be challenging to learn and apply for some people, wikis offer many amenities for collaborative teams, such as document repositories, directories, scheduling capabilities, and meeting documents. These amenities ensure that all team members have access to the group's documents and information in one location, but also allow the user to designate the wiki as a members-only forum to ensure privacy.

In my opinion there is a lot to learn about how Writing for the Web can help increase motivation for writing and help students learn how to adapt their texts for different audiences, tasks, and purposes. Below are some of the points that outline the effectiveness of wikis in class;

Focus on High Level Thinking

Wikis are becoming a popular tool in learning because they involve high-level thinking and information skills.

Collaborative Learning. Wikis allow learners to participate in a project larger than them. Participants are able to learn from each other and expand their thinking about a topic by working as a team. In addition, it's easy to go back and track who, did what, when.

Inquiry. Wikis involve learners in asking increasingly sophisticated questions related to their topic. After the initial excitement about the topic and exploration of essential questions, learners begin to assimilate new information and draw inferences. This leads to reflection and additional questions. This recursive process leads to increasing complex questions, more in-depth analysis, and deeper understandings. These abstract connections can be made more concrete for learners through the creation of wikis. Features such as hyperlinks allow contributors to share their mental linkages among pieces of information.

Information Organization. Wikis encourage learners to think about how information can be organized to maximize understanding. For example, wikis can use alphabetical, chronological, hierarchical, geographical, or thematic approaches. Some people use outlines or visual maps (i.e., cluster map, flowchart, and mind map) for organization. Others design around regional locations, events, characters, key words, genre, categories, or other ways of thinking about a topic.

The flexible structure of wikis in particular offers a new format for collaboration. A number of studies have investigated the impact of wiki use upon student collaboration during group work in higher education. More specifically, wiki use has been found to both improve the efficiency of group work and the quality of interactions between students in a group. 

In addition to the largely positive picture the literature paints of wiki use for improving collaboration between students (and teachers); there is a good deal of attention given to the benefits of wikis for students’ writing. First, writing in a wiki sometimes appears to change the students’ understanding of themselves as authors.

Arguably, the role of wikis in encouraging critical thinking and self-reflection sits well with constructivist theories of learning. Wikis highlight the importance of shared meanings: ‘the wiki becomes both a tool for choice and action.