Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment. This paper explains wiki usage, investigates its contribution to various learning paradigms, examines the current literature on wiki use in education, and suggests additional uses in teaching software engineering.

Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment. This paper explains wiki usage, investigates its contribution to various learning paradigms, examines the current literature on wiki use in education, and suggests additional uses in teaching software engineering.

A wiki is a web tool that allows users to easily create and edit web pages collaboratively. The ease-of-editing feature and accessibility from anywhere by anyone make wikis ideal for project collaboration. Although the wiki was introduced more than ten years ago, its use is relatively new in academia. This research explores the potential uses of wikis in Software Engineering, especially for software project team collaboration and communication. The author introduced wikis in a project-based software engineering course, and students soon discovered a number of innovative ways in which wikis can augment collaborative software development activities. A student survey indicates that vast majority of students found the wiki to be a good tool for project collaboration, and most of them plan to use wikis for future projects even if not required to do so.

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The selection of a programming language for introductory courses has long been an informal process involving faculty evaluation, discussion, and consensus. As the number of faculty, students, and language options grows, this process becomes increasingly unwieldy. As it stands, the process currently lacks structure and replicability. Establishing a structured approach to the selection of a programming language would enable a more thorough evaluation of the available options and a more easily supportable selection. Developing and documenting an instrument and a methodology for language selection will allow the process to be more easily repeated in the future.This set of criteria, as well as the instrument designed around it, are designed to be extensible, allowing revision of both the criteria and the process as new programming paradigms and languages are introduced and old ones fall out of favor. It is hoped that this formal method will yield the structure and repeatability missing from existing approaches.