Wikis mainly distribute user-generated content over the article and its corresponding talk page. While educational research provides article-related suggestions for learner's support, research has rarely analysed the potentials of supporting learning-related processes at the talk page level. With the presented experiment, we address this issue by investigating effects of visual controversy awareness information on content-related discussion threads. Such information can induce socio-cognitive conflicts which research assumes to be beneficial for learning, particularly when contradictory evidence leads wiki discussions. We investigated how controversy awareness highlighting as implicit guidance directs students' (N = 81) navigation and learning processes as wells as their internalized knowledge representations. Results indicate that the implementation of controversy awareness representations helped students to focus on selecting meaningful discussion threads. Our findings suggest that wiki talk page users can benefit from additional structuring aids and increase their learning outcome when being aware of occurring controversies.

Group awareness (GA) tools can facilitate learning processes and outcomes by visualizing different social attributes, such as cognitive and behavioral information about group members. To assist learning and writing in social media, combining various types of awareness information may foster learning processes due to challenges, which are difficult to address by one type of GA information alone. The systematic investigation of GA tool combinations is largely unexplored with GA information often being examined separately or intermixed. To reveal both positive and negative (interaction) effects of providing different types of GA information, we conducted a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with N = 158 participants. Learners were provided with a wiki learning environment and, except for the control condition, different types of GA tools involving cognitive (knowledge bars) and/or behavioral (participation bars) GA information. GA tool effects were considered at wiki selection, discussion, and article levels. Eye-tracking was used for investigating the attentional effect of the GA visualizations. The results show that both types of GA information have effects on individuals’ selection preference, more strongly with the goal to learn new content than to support other wiki collaborators, which were introduced as within goal scenarios. Also, participants provided with behavioral GA support were more engaged in wiki contributions. However, only the combination of cognitive and behavioral GA information, rather than their separate visualization, had a positive effect on resulting article quality. This highlights the need for a holistic perspective when developing GA tools to improve wiki processes and outcomes.

One of Wikipedia's main guiding principles reads as follows: Be Bold. From Wikipedia's early days on users were encouraged to share their knowledge at any convenient time without major restrictions by either adding new content or editing the encyclopaedia's existing content in the sense of knowledge building in collaborative writing systems. In order to ensure that authors and editors of articles successfully collaborate on shared knowledge artifacts, rules and guidelines have been implemented into the community closely related to the "Be Bold" principle. One of these guidelines is the so-called Bold, Revert, Discuss (BRD) Cycle that describes a workflow corresponding to a collaboration script on how individuals in an environment like Wikipedia should interact with each other to jointly create and manage articles. This cycle was primarily implemented to attract masses of new authors and editors to the community by lowering the bar for participation. From today's point of view it is debatable if this procedure should be further promoted or if alternative methods as the in this study proposed script Discuss, Deliberate, Revise (DDR) prove themselves as more effective for knowledge building with a special focus on socio-cognitive conflicts in wikis. We expect that students collaboratively working together using the DDR alternative script will produce qualitatively higher articles and will perform better in a knowledge test about the study's topic.

Complex knowledge exchange processes in collaborative knowledge building settings within wikis can be either supported by providing guidance in form of cognitive group awareness information or by explicitly guiding learners with the help of collaboration scripts. Potentials of analyzing and supporting discussants' knowledge building processes focused on the level of talk pages have still been rarely researched. Our research project comprises a series of three experimental studies and one qualitative study to determine which kind of support is most beneficial for varying types of learners working with wikis. For this research different fields of computer-supported collaborative learning are integrated and both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to provide comprehensive analyses in order to provide opportunities for other related research. Presenting and discussing aspects of our research and first results could be beneficial for future research. Our findings suggest that wiki talk page users can benefit from additional structuring aids.

Knowledge construction assignments with wikis can be found in various educational settings. However, wiki environments are not inevitably suited to help learning and thus more guidance could be useful. In this study, we investigated the effects of two collaboration scripts with different aims during a two-week period of knowledge construction with wikis as a supplement to lectures about descriptive statistics.