Wikis: Do They Need Usability Engineering?

I have to prepare a session on Web 2.0 for some web design students (so, not just “Education 2.0”), so I thought I’d look at what’s already available in Slideshare – with the thought of adding mine to it. Searching for Web2 brought up this presentation Wikis: Do They Need Usability Engineering?, which is looking at the use of Wikis in Higher Education. They’ve not got an audio file (as far as I can tell) and the slide notes aren’t very comprehensive, so I’m not se ure if there was originally more information than I have access to. While the premise of the presentation seems to be that improving the usability would lead to more students using the Wiki, the results that they present seem to point out to me the lack of motivation to use the wiki was the main reason for the low active particpation.