Deployment of simple user-centered collaborative technologies in educational institutions - experiences and requirements

Abstract

In our modern society with its variety of learning and work processes, collaborative structuring of knowledge plays an important role. With new and growing phenomena in mind, such as the user-centered wiki systems, this paper looks at the various ways of organizing collaboration in virtual knowledge spaces. As part of a novel teaching concept - embedded in a system for cooperative knowledge organization - spatial structuring of knowledge forms an essential part of teaching and learning. Based on the evaluation results of this concept, the paper focuses on collaborative writing methods and the requirements of tools used with special consideration of wikis. It then goes on to describe the concrete realization of a fusion of semantic-spatial structuring techniques and collaborative writing considering as example the integration of wiki techniques into virtual knowledge spaces.