KEEPING THE BALL ROLLING: TEACHING

STRATEGIES USING WIKIPEDIA

An Argument in Favor of its Use in Computer Science Courses

Carlos Cotta

ETSI Inform

atica (3.2.49), Universidad de M

alaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071 M

alaga, Spain

Keywords:

Web-based strategies, Wikipedia, Collaborative work, Sophomore programming, Computer science.

Abstract:

Edition of Wikipedia articles has been recently proposed as a learning assignment. I argue it ideally suits

Computer Science courses, due to the intrinsic mathematical nature of the concepts and structures considered

in this ﬁeld. It also provides beneﬁts in terms of autonomous research and team-working, as well as a valuable

legacy for future years’ students. This view is supported by a two-year experience in sophomore programming

subjects in the University of M

alaga, Spain.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is out of question that the younger generations of

students perceive issues such as socialization, net-

working, and access to information in a fundamen-

tally different way than older generations, cf. (Rosen,

2004; Zook, 2007). They routinely utilize the web

not just as an integral tool in their quest for informa-

tion on any topic, but as a form of self-expression: as

(Dye, 2007) points out, digital creation is the stan-

dard outlet for their creative urges. They are used

to, and lively seek, playing an active role in content

management, evolution, or annotation – e.g., (Tuc-

cillo, 2007). This means that in addition to creating

content from scratch, other forms of interaction such

as commenting, tagging, etc. are widespread. This

behavioral pattern is very well suited to collaborative

initiatives such as social news websites, wikis, etc.

(Bundy et al., 2007). Regarding the latter, they offer a

great opportunity to canalize this content-production

pulsion, fostering as well other valuable educational

skills, such as team-working among others.

I speciﬁcally consider here the case of Wikipedia.

Born in early 2001 as a small collaborative project,

Wikipedia has become a huge multilingual, collabora-

tive encyclopedia whose contents are often the prime

source when it comes to search for basic information

on certain topics. Indeed, several studies (Giles, 2005;

Rosenzweig, 2006) have shown that the factual ac-

curacy of Wikipedia article is comparable to reputed

commercial encyclopedias.

Quite interestingly, scientiﬁc areas in general, and

computer science (CS) in particular, are typically very

reliable in the Wikipedia (Read, 2006) (such ﬁelds

usually rest on mathematical foundations, and are less

prone to biased editing). This ﬁrstly implies that

Wikipedia constitutes a valuable resource to CS stu-

dents looking for complementary information. It can

be secondly inferred that a well-informed group of

editors and administrators exists for this ﬁeld. This

turns out to be important as a quality ﬁlter for a teach-

ing strategy that uses the edition of Wikipedia articles

as a student assignment. Such a strategy was semi-

nally proposed by M. Groom (Brockhaus and Groom,

2007) in the context of environmental courses.

This paper argues in favor of this strategy in CS

courses, which constitute an ideal context for its de-

velopment (due to both the nature of the topics treated

and the skills of the students). This is backed up

by a two year experience in sophomore programming

courses in the University of M

alaga (UMA), Spain.

As subsidiary beneﬁts of this strategy one can cite au-

tonomous research, team-working, and critical sense

(beneﬁts arising from the use of the tool). The pri-

mary beneﬁts are the knowledge acquired by students

on the topics treated and the valuable legacy for future

years’ students (beneﬁts arising form the contents de-

veloped).

2 ACADEMIC CONTEXT

An experience has been carried out in two subjects

taught in sophomore CS courses in the UMA. These

337

Cotta C. (2010).

KEEPING THE BALL ROLLING: TEACHING STRATEGIES USING WIKIPEDIA - An Argument in Favor of its Use in Computer Science Courses.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 337-340

DOI: 10.5220/0002859303370340

 SciTePress

subjects are Abstract Data Types (ADT) and Analysis

and Design of Algorithms (ADA), two core subjects

in the three CS degrees imparted in the UMA:

• ADT is a subject that focuses on the character-

ization and formal speciﬁcation of abstract data

types. The goal is having the students acquiring

an adequate knowledge of the properties and spec-

iﬁcation of most usual ADTs (stack, queues, trees,

etc.) as well as being capable of specifying new

ADTs, either de novo or by extending pre-existing

ADTs. Formal speciﬁcation is done using Maude,

an interpretable language for algebraic speciﬁca-

tion based on equational logic.

• ADA focuses on the study of techniques for algo-

rithmic design (e.g., divide and conquer, greedy

methods, dynamic programming, etc.), providing

the students the means for reasoning about their

applicability and suitability for speciﬁc problems,

as well as for actually applying them. The stu-

dent should be also capable of analyzing the so-

constructed algorithms in terms of their computa-

tional complexity in space and time, as well as as-

certaining the intrinsic complexity of solving spe-

ciﬁc problems.

As it can be seen, both subjects deal with topics

of a strong mathematical foundation, thus naturally

adapting to a neutral approach based on mathematical

structures and rigorous constructs.

It must be also mentioned that Spanish univer-

sities –and the UMA is no exception– are now in-

volved in the process of adapting to the European

Space for Higher Education following the guidelines

of the Bologna Declaration

. While the new structure

of CS degrees has been delineated but not yet applied

(it will be in successive years starting in the 2010-11

academic year), new teaching methodologies adapted

to the philosophy of the European Credit Transfer

System (ECTS) –in which the satisfactory completion

of a subject amounts to successfully acquiring cer-

tain skills and competencies– are already being put

in practice (Cotta, 2010). These teaching strategies

are student-centric and try to boost autonomous (in-

dividual and in group) work by the students. The

competence-based structure of subjects lends itself

very well to a continuous assessment strategy. Thus,

the grade is obtained by the outcome of numerous ac-

tivities during the semester, including the Wikipedia

assignment.

http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/

3 ORGANIZATION AND

METHODS

The experience has been carried out during academic

courses 2007-08 and 2008-09. It has been approached

as a team-working activity, and hence students were

ﬁrstly arranged in groups of two up to four stu-

dents (the size of the group was later taken into ac-

count when assigning topics for edition). The par-

ticular composition of groups was a matter of self-

organization, since the students grouped according to

their own personal afﬁnity and interests.

After groups were organized, a bidding phase

was arranged. I selected a list of topics for which

Wikipedia entries in Spanish were non-existent or

very incomplete. Having focused on the Span-

ish Wikipedia is due to practical considerations: in

general Spanish sophomore students are not ﬂuent

enough in English so as to embark on full-scale edit-

ing of the English Wikipedia; forcing them to do so

would have place an unnecessary burden on them.

Also related to this, the legacy of the experience is

going to be much more useful for future students who

will ﬁnd the information in their native tongue. Note

also that the topics chosen for edition were intimately

related to the contents of the ADT and ADA. Table 1

outlines the articles that were considered.

The assignment of topics to groups was done on

the basis of each group’s preferences, prioritizing

smaller groups on some topics, and breaking ties us-

ing a FIFO policy. The due date for completing the as-

signment was the end of the corresponding semester,

and students were given some guidelines on how to

approach the task:

• A goal was having the Spanish entry of the cor-

responding article as complete as the English ver-

sion.

• Bibliographical research on textbooks and Inter-

net was encouraged. A warning was also given

with respect to the use of copyrighted material.

• Articles did not need being edited at once, but it

was necessary to check carefully (both presenta-

tion and correctness) the new material before pub-

lishing it.

• Related to the previous issue, spelling, punctua-

tion and writing style had to be carefully revised.

• Crosslinking other articles was essential. In some

cases linked articles would not exist in the Spanish

Wikipedia. Depending on the case, a stub could

be created, or even a reasonable edition of the re-

lated article could be attempted.

No speciﬁc indications had to be given regarding

the actual use of the editor front-end of the Wikipedia,

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

338

Table 1: Some topics considered in the experience.

ADT ADA

2-3 and 2-3-4 trees Amortized analysis

AVL trees Backtracking

B trees Bellman-Ford algorithm

Binary trees Boruvka algorithm

Binary search tree Branch and bound

Fibonacci heaps Cryptography and complexity

Graphs Divide and Conquer

Heaps Dynamic Programming

Linked lists Floyd-Warshall algorithm

Maude Johnson algorithm

Queues Karatsuba algorithm

Red-Black trees P vs NP

Sets and bags PSPACE

Splay trees Recurrence relations

Stacks Shortest path problem

Strassen algorithm

and the students had no problem when researching

their way through the editing procedure.

4 RESULTS

The outcome of the experience can be regarded as

very positive. The Spanish version of the Wikipedia

is now very complete on the topics mentioned, consti-

tuting a very valuable resource for Spanish-speaking

students all over the world. No major problems were

observed during the realization of the activity with re-

gard to the administrators. In several cases, edited ar-

ticles departed somewhat from the standard encyclo-

pedic style, being excessively technical and/or direct.

In these cases the corresponding entries were tagged

as in need of “wikiﬁcation” according to style con-

ventions.

As mentioned before, lack of ﬂuency in English

was one of the reasons why we focused on the Spanish

Wikipedia. However, while written expression in ac-

ceptable English is somewhat difﬁcult for an average

student, their reading skills have been shown in gen-

eral good enough to be able to adopt material from the

English Wikipedia or from other sources. Note also

that with some exceptions in which Spanish entries

were non-existent, in many cases there was a base ar-

ticle (even if very incomplete) to start working with.

This means that a straight translation of a non-Spanish

article was not an option in general. On the contrary,

a more selective approach to detect missing informa-

tion or relevant gaps in the Spanish article was neces-

sary. Students were somewhat framed by the context

of ADT and ADA courses as well, implying that they

Figure 1: Academic results in the last years.

also added some new material of their own, regard-

ing speciﬁc topics (e.g., some Maude speciﬁcation for

certain ADTs).

Figure 1 shows academic results during the last

three years (2006 is being used as control). In the

case of ADT, the test group (comprising +60 to +70

students depending on the year) is one out of ﬁve

groups (comprising a total number of between +200

and +300 students) belonging to technical engineer-

ing (3-year) degrees. These ﬁve groups are course-

wise coordinated, down to sharing the same ﬁnal

exam, and hence a comparison is made between the

average of these ﬁve groups and the test group. In

the case of ADA, the test group is the unique group

(comprising +30 to +60 students) in the engineering

(5-year) degree, and therefore the comparison is done

with respect to the same group in 2006. Average

marks are computed according to 5 different grades

(0=fail, 1=pass, 2=good, 3=superior, 4=outstanding).

Notice that ECTS teaching strategies were implanted

in 2007-08, and it seems to have resulted in an overall

improvement of grades (even if just slightly in some

cases). The group that followed this experience ob-

tained remarkably better average gradings. A point

of caution is nevertheless required since it cannot be

KEEPING THE BALL ROLLING: TEACHING STRATEGIES USING WIKIPEDIA - An Argument in Favor of its Use in

Computer Science Courses

339

Table 2: Confusion matrix relating completion of the

Wikipedia assignment to successfully passing the course.

ADT

Wikipedia

yes no subtotal

pass 69.6% 10.1% 79.7%

fail 11.6% 8.7% 20.3%

subtotal 81.2% 18.8%

ADA

Wikipedia

yes no subtotal

pass 57.7% 9.9% 67.6%

fail 21.1% 11.3% 32.4%

subtotal 78.9% 21.1%

ruled out that other factors (e.g., different teachers

provide different approaches to certain topics, moti-

vation can differ, etc.) take part in the observed distri-

bution of grades.

To obtain a better perspective of the results, Table

2 shows the cross-distribution of passing percentages

and completion of the Wikipedia assignment. Follow-

ing this distribution, we compute the probability of

passing the course conditioned to having completed

the Wikipedia assignment

P(pass|Wiki) =

P(pass ∩Wiki)

P(Wiki)

Similarly, we compute P(pass|¬Wiki), the probabil-

ity of passing conditioned to not having completed the

assignment. We obtain that among students doing the

assignment, 85.7% pass ADT and 73.2% pass ADA.

Conversely, among those who do not complete the

assignment these percentages are 53.8% and 46.7%,

much lower values.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Wikipedia is a prime example of a content provider

based on crowdsourcing. It is also one of the most

popular references from which basic information is

sought at an undergraduate level. Actively using this

resource not just as an information source but as a ve-

hicle for canalizing academic content creation is thus

a form of positive feedback. It constitutes a way of

keeping the ball rolling, contributing to the global in-

formation pool. More importantly as to which ed-

ucation concerns, it is an excellent way of promot-

ing self-study of selected topics. The need of com-

municating academic information in a sensible way

(and in an self-organized environment with its own

control and self-repairing mechanisms) stimulates the

student to comprehend the topic at hand. This is par-

ticularly well-suited to subjects in which these top-

ics have a mathematical foundation, or at least rest

on rigorous facts and/or procedures, since they rely

more on factual accuracy and understanding on the

underlying math, than on contextual interpretation or

personal bias of the student.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is supported by MICINN under project

NEMESIS (TIN2008-05941). Thanks are due to the

reviewers for useful comments.

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