In practice, student presentation web sites have at least two distinct and serious drawbacks. First, from our experience, not all students have sufficient skills to create or edit website. The collaborative activity tends to break into two distinct task sub-groups. Students who have minimal web skills tend to do the required research and writing whereas the student(s) with web creation skills end up creating the website from the contributions of their peers and have little time to get involved in the other aspects of the activity. Second, websites seem to attract significant emphasis on the ‘eye candy' that ‘tastes good' but has little content value. Making attractive websites takes a considerable amount of time and effort - time that is diverted from the task of creating the intellectual content required by the group project.

In contrast, wikis (Hawaiian for quick) allow students to work in a truly collaborative atmosphere. They are so easy to use that each student quickly learns to post their own contributions and edit or correct the work submitted by their peers. Also, the whole project can be viewed and discussed simultaneously. Wikis also tend to undercut the wide-spread tendency to build elaborate websites that focus on presentation rather than content.

From our experience, wikis can decrease the ‘eye candy', raise the quality of the content and ensure that everyone is involved in all aspects of a collaborative project.