ClassroomWiki: a collaborative Wiki for institutional use

Abstract

Nowadays, Wikis are used as a tool to for collaborative writing and editing of documents. However, typical Wikis do not adequately address the assessment of individual contributions. To improve these aspects, we propose ClassroomWiki---a web-based collaborative Wiki writing tool. For the students, ClassroomWiki provides a web interface for writing and revising their group's Wiki and a topic-based forum for discussing their ideas during collaboration. When the students collaborate, ClassroomWiki tracks all student activities and builds detailed student models that represent their contributions toward their groups. For the teacher, ClassroomWiki provides a multiagent framework that uses the student models to form student groups to improve the collaborative learning of students. ClassroomWiki can improve the collaborative learning outcome of the students by its group formation framework and help the teacher better assess a student's contribution toward his or her group. It facilitates specific and precise teacher intervention with accurate and detailed tracking of student activities.