In diesem Artikel beschreiben die Autoren den mehrjährigen Einsatz eines selbst entwickelten Wikis (CoWeb) am Georgia Tech zu Ausbildungszwecken in hunderten von Kursen. Sie zeigen dies als Beispiel von 'design based research' und verbinden damit ein Plädoyer für design based research im Bereich von neuen Medien in der Lehre.

In this article, we concentrate on understanding the potential of one new medium, the WikiWikiWeb. [...] this medium has great potential to support collaborative learning. As with other new media, realizing that potential is far from trivial. Significant use is necessary to properly understand the potential of the new medium (Bolter & Grusin, 1999; McLuhan, 1964). Adopters need the freedom to innovate. The more contexts and uses the medium is applied to, the more likely it is that the true affordances of the new medium will emerge.

Since 1998, we have been developing and researching CoWeb, a version of Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb designed to support collaborative learning. In this article, we summarize our results of situating CoWeb across the academic landscape of Georgia Tech. In architecture, CoWeb enabled faculty to serve more students in a design-based course. In English composition, a comparison study demonstrated significant learning benefits without incurring disproportionate costs. Yet, situating CoWeb was not always successful. In many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes, students actively resisted collaboration. From these studies, we conclude that the culture of the classroom and the discipline needs to be compatible with the medium for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) to be effective. Finally, we demonstrate how collaboration can be designed into the culture. A new class on introductory computing was explicitly designed to take advantage of the collaborative possibilities that CoWeb affords. We report our findings of the success of this approach.
We characterize this research as a scholarship of application. We demonstrate that this mode of scholarship is a viable mode of scholarship in the learning sciences. Unlike traditional scholarship of discovery, we are not solely concerned with discovering new knowledge. Instead, we support others in the application of a new technology to serve genuine and complex learning situations. By doing so, we seek to understand the potential that one new medium (WikiWikiWeb) has for supporting learning.