Use of Semantics to Build an Academic Writing Community Environment

Writing a dissertation is a critical aspect of the learning experience for most university students in all disciplines. It is often accompanied by anxiety and uncertainty, which supervisors often struggle to understand and address. A community-driven approach to support dissertation writing based on semantic social scaffolding is presented here. The paper describes how a semantic wiki was tailored to develop a social writing environment to provide holistic support throughout the whole dissertation process. Based on initial evaluation studies, we discuss the benefits and pitfalls of semantics. The work contributes to a recent research strand that examines how to exploit new social computing technologies to develop effective learning environments.