Wikis in Teaching: An Experiment with WikiHaskell and StatMediaWiki

Abstract

This article presents WikiHaskell, a project based on wiki technologies developed on the Computer Engineering degree course at the University of Cadiz. WikiHaskell is a wiki for which students, organised into groups of three, create complementary materials on Haskell programming language libraries. The main objective of this project is to introduce open knowledge creation into the classroom, thus turning the students into the true protagonists of the course subject. To assess the wiki and, therefore, the work done by the students, StatMediaWiki was developed. This is a statistical analysis system for MediaWiki wikis that allows such assessments to be performed both easily and transparently. StatMediaWiki generates an overall report of the wiki and individual analyses of the work done by user, by page and by category. In the experiment described, StatMediaWiki's analysis of the time distribution of the students' contributions allowed a range of user profiles to be identified. Likewise, by-category analysis allowed certain situations within a group to be detected, such as the identification of the lead students or the less active ones. Both the wiki content and the StatMediaWiki code are open source and publicly accessible.