either through self-assessment or peer assessment of
learning outcomes (Barootchi and Keshavarz, 2002).
Not discussing the didactic advantage of these evalu-
ation procedures for the formative evaluation during
the learning process (Boud, 2007), the teacher might
sometimes miss important information for an eventual
summative evaluation (Falchikov, 2005).
From the analysis of contributions to a wiki, a
teacher (or even a student) can have worthwhile in-
formation to assess, self-assess or peer-assess the re-
sults of a collaborative learning experience (Cubric,
2007a). The scope of this paper is limited to experi-
menting with software-supported assessment of wiki-
based contributions for traditional teacher-based eval-
uation procedures. Our work is focused on Medi-
aWiki software, the most popular wiki system nowa-
days (it is used in Wikipedia and related projects, like
Wiktionary, Wikibooks or Wikisource).
The rest of this document is organized as fol-
lows: first, some techniques for the assessment of
wiki-based learning experiences are discussed and
some support tools are analysed. Third section deals
with two experiences, each one using a different tool,
namely StatMediaWiki and HistoryFlow, and shows
how their role is in the learning process. Finally, some
discussions about the experiences and conclusions are
provided, along with an outline of the future work.
2 WIKI-BASED
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
EXPERIENCES
A great number of collaborative e-learning processes
are supported by wikis, including Higher Education
(Jaksch et al., 2008) and blended learning experiences
(Cubric, 2007b). Wikis are collaborative tools that
serve multiple purposes in Higher Education, spe-
cially for collaborative writing, assessment (Cubric,
2007a; Liu and He, 2008), software development
(Louridas, 2006) and project management (Trentin,
2008). In the following, a number of wiki-based pro-
cedures and tools are studied to analyse how well they
support the research issue, i.e. how they can help the
evaluator to assess an e-learning experience.
2.1 Assessment of Wiki-based Learning
Experiences
Initial proposals to support assessment in wikis tried
to generate question item models on a wiki for for-
mative assessment (Liu and He, 2008). Similar ap-
proaches have been provided with either formative
or summative evaluation purposes (Cubric, 2007a;
Cubric, 2007b). First proposals that evaluate learning
outcomes on the basis of individual students’ contri-
butions to the wiki define metrics in terms of generic
wiki-based log indicators (e.g. number and size of
contributions) (Trentin, 2008) or a set of pre-defined
categories for contributions (de Pedro, 2007). Al-
though such analyses are done on the basis of direct
observation and measurement of the wiki log values,
a number of useful tools have been provided to illus-
trate these in a more abstract fashion. Next, some of
these tools are summarized and described.
2.2 Wiki-based Contributions Analysis
Tools
After a bibliographical search, three tools supporting
MediaWiki wiki-based collaborative learning experi-
ences have been found:
HistoryFlow by the MIT Media Lab and the Col-
laborative User Experience Research Group in
IBM (Vi´egas et al., 2004). It is a data analysis
tool that retrieves the history of a given page of a
wiki. It produces diagrams as graphical represen-
tation of differences in sentences between consec-
utive versions of that page throughout time. This
is finer than usual behavior in Wikipedia, which
checks differences between paragraphs. Different
aspects of authorship can be highlighted with His-
toryFlow, i.e. contributions from all authors, con-
tributions from a single author, new contributions
from any author and content persistence.
WikiXRay by LibreSoft Research Group at the Uni-
versity Rey Juan Carlos (Ortega et al., 2007) is
a set of Python and GNU R scripts that makes a
quantitative analysis of public database dumps of
a MediaWiki website. WikiXRay builds an SQL
database with the data obtained from the dump
and creates additional tables with useful quanti-
tative information. A number of scripts are pro-
vided to generate many statistics and graphics,
and new ones can be created to obtained cus-
tomized output.
StatMediaWiki by the SPI&FM Research Group at
the University of C´adiz (Rodr´ıguez et al., 2010)
is a tool that collects and aggregates information
that help to analyze the status and development
of a MediaWiki installation. StatMediaWiki ver-
sion 1.0 generates CSV files and static XHTML
1.0 standard-compliant web pages including ta-
bles and graphics, showing timelines for the con-
tent evolution, activity charts for users and pages,
rankings, tag clouds, etc. The anonymous op-
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