Wiki-mediated Collaborative Writing in Teacher Education
Assessing Three Years of Experiences and Influencing Factors
Said Hadjerrouit
Faculty of Technology and Science, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Keywords: Action Category, Collaborative Learning, Collaborative Writing, MediaWiki, Taxonomy, Wiki.
Abstract: Wikis have been reported as tools that promote collaborative writing in educational settings. Examples of
wikis in teacher education are group projects, glossary creation, teacher evaluation, and document review.
However, in spite of studies that report on successful stories, the claim that wikis support collaborative
writing has not yet been firmly confirmed in real educational settings. Most studies are limited to
participants’ subjective perceptions, and do not take into account influencing factors, or the relationships
between wikis and the learning environment. In this paper, students’ collaborative writing activities over a
period of three years are investigated using a taxonomy of action categories and the wiki data log that tracks
all students’ actions. The paper analyses the level of contribution of each member of student groups, the
types of actions that the groups carried out on the wikis, and the timing of contribution. The article also
discusses personal and contextual factors that may influence collaborative writing activities in teacher
education, and recommendations for students as well.
1 INTRODUCTION
Wikis have been used in teacher education to
achieve varied educational goals, such as teacher
evaluation, document assessment, or student
projects. Research studies point out to the
potentialities of wikis to support collaborative work
(Minocha and Thomas, 2007; Thomas et al., 2009).
However, in spite of positive experiences that have
been reported in the literature (Kuteeva, 2011;
Naismith et al., 2011), a number of researchers are
more circumspect about the potentialities of wikis to
support collaborative learning and writing. Several
hypotheses have been raised to explain the low level
of collaboration when using wikis: unfamiliarity
with wikis, lack of experience, dominant learning
paradigm, limited student contribution, reluctance
and resistance to use wiki, lack of motivation and
engagement, time management, problem of
ownership, and lack of appropriate pedagogy (Cole,
2009; Grant, 2009; Elgort et al., 2008; Judd et al.,
2010; Karasavvidis, 2010).
To further explore these hypotheses, this article
reports on a small-scale empirical study in teacher
education that examined the extent to which students
collaborated to perform wiki-based tasks associated
with collaborative writing over a period of three
years. The work uses the wiki data log (or history
log), and a taxonomy of action categories to
investigate the value of wiki-mediated collaborative
writing. In addition, influencing factors that may
impact collaborative writing with wikis are
discussed, including some recommendations to help
students engage in collaboration.
The article is structured as follows. First, the
relationship between wiki technology and
collaborative writing is clarified. Second, related
research work is reported. The next section describes
the theoretical framework, followed by the
methodology of the work. Then, the results and
discussion are presented. Finally, some remarks
conclude the article.
2 WIKI-MEDIATED
COLLABORATIVE WRITING
2.1 Wiki Technology
This work used one of the most popular wiki
platforms – MediaWiki - to perform collaborative
writing activities (Kasemvilas and Olfman, 2009).
MediaWiki uses a simplified HTML language and
provides an extensive functionality for user
authentication, making it appropriate for educational
5
Hadjerrouit S..
Wiki-mediated Collaborative Writing in Teacher Education - Assessing Three Years of Experiences and Influencing Factors .
DOI: 10.5220/0004716800050014
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 5-14
ISBN: 978-989-758-020-8
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
purposes (Su and Beaumont, 2010). Another
important functionality of MediaWiki is the history
log that keeps track of students’ actions by name,
date, and colour coding (Lund and Smørdal, 2006).
In addition, MediaWiki provides a discussion page
for communication, reflections and negotiations.
2.2 Wiki and Collaborative Writing
Collaborative writing is an activity that enables
participants to produce a text collectively (Witney
and Smallbone, 2011). It is grounded in the social-
constructivist learning theory (Vygotsky, 1978), and
assumes that participants can achieve more in terms
of learning benefits than individuals. Collaborative
writing is opposed to simply splitting up the task,
work independently of each other, and then
assemble individual contributions to a final product.
This activity is called cooperation rather than
collaboration (Scanlon, 2000, cited in Judd,
Kennedy and Cropper, 2010).
Wikis provide a space for collaborative writing
by means of a simple interface allowing students to
share information, discuss, negotiate, and produce a
text by more than one author. Wiki-mediated
collaborative writing is a coordinated activity that
enables students to edit and revise each other’s
contribution to the wiki task (Chao and Lo, 2011;
Meishar-Tal and Gorsky, 2010; Trentin, 2009;
Witney and Smallbone, 2011).
3 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE
The underlying theoretical perspective of this
research relies on a taxonomy developed by Pfeil,
Zaphiris and Ang (2006). It is used to classify and
analyse students’ actions carried on the wiki. The
taxonomy included originally 13 actions, of which
the following 10 were identified as important for this
work (Ibid, p. 101):
• Add Information (or content) - Addition of topic-
related information
• Add Link - Addition of links or linking of a word
within an existing sentence to a page
• Clarify Information (or content) - Rewording of
existing information without adding new
information. Rewording done in order to clarify
the content
• Delete Information (or content) - Deletion of
topic-related information.
• Delete Link - Deletion of links or removal of the
linking function from a word within a sentence
• Fix Link - Modification of an existing link
• Format - Changes that affect the appearance or
structure of the page
• Grammar - Alterations of the grammar
• Spelling - Correction of spelling mistakes
• Style/typography - Activities that affect the
presentation of the text
To measure the degree of collaboration, these
actions can be classified from the lowest level of
collaboration (that is cooperation as defined above)
to the highest level of collaboration. Between these
levels, a wide range of actions can be stated. The
lowest level of collaboration is performed when
students only add content/link, delete content/link
within their own subtask. A high level of
collaboration is achieved when students rephrase
each other’s work, clarify and modify the content of
the wiki, and correct the grammar and spelling. In
addition to rewording and clarifying content as
defined in the taxonomy, students can make peers
aware of changes and ask them to react to them.
These activities can provide a high level of
collaborative writing. Between these forms, varied
level of collaboration can be achieved, for example
when students clarify the meaning of other’s work,
add content and links to already existing pages,
structure some other’s work by moving sentences.
As a result, some actions may be considered as more
cooperative than collaborative activities, while other
activities may be classified as more collaborative
than cooperative, as defined above.
4 RELATED WORK
Wiki-mediated collaborative writing can be studied
from different perspectives and methods. A literature
review reveals that most studies use qualitative
methods such as interviews and quantitative
methods such as survey questionnaires to investigate
participants’ perceptions of collaborative writing.
In recent years, a growing number of studies
have drawn on the wiki data log, also called history
function that tracks all students’ actions being made
on the wiki. The history log is inherently more
reliable to analyse students’ collaborative writing
activities than perceptions-based studies. This work
is a continuation and a synthesis of a research that
started in 2010 in the field of wiki-mediated
collaborative writing over a period of three years
(Hadjerrouit, 2011; Hadjerrouit, 2012a, Hadjerrouit,
2012b; Hadjerrouit, 2013a, Hadjerrouit, 2013b).
This previous work used both the wiki data log and
the taxonomy described in the theoretical
perspective. A similar work was done by Judd,
CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
6
Kennedy, and Cropper (2010), who analysed data
that are automatically recorded in the history log to
assess the nature and scope of users’ contributions.
They found little evidence of collaborative writing
among participants, and that many students’
contributions were superficial. Likewise, Leung and
Chu (2009) reported that students worked
individually most of the time, and edited each
other’s contributions if necessary. In some contrast,
Meishar-Tal and Gorsky (2010) indicated that
adding text was carried by a large majority of
students, but the percentage of editorial changes was
higher than adding sentences, because the students
were required to edit each other’s work.
Nevertheless, most of the work based on the wiki
data log pointed out that wikis do not automatically
make collaboration happen due to a number of
influencing factors in the teaching and learning
environment.
5 METHODOLOGY
5.1 Research Goal and Questions
This work aims at exploring the extent to which
students collaborated to perform wiki-based tasks
associated with collaborative writing in teacher
education. Relying on the taxonomy described in the
theoretical perspective and the history log that tracks
all students’ contributions to the wikis, this work
attempts to address three questions:
1. What is the level of work contribution of each
member of the student groups?
2. What are the types of actions that the groups
carried out on the wikis?
3. What are the time intervals and timing of
contributions of the groups?
5.2 Participants
The experiments over a three-year period were based
on three cohorts of participants. The participative
students were enrolled in a Web 2.0 technology
course that was offered each year. None of the
students experienced wiki-based collaborative
writing before taking the course. Some students
possessed good technical skills, while other had
background in pedagogy and learning paradigms.
The first experiment lasted for a whole semester
from January to May 2010, while the following
experiments in 2011 and 2012 lasted for eight
weeks. The number of participants in 2010 was 8
students, divided into 3 groups of 2-4 students. In
2011, the number of participants was 10, divided
into 3 groups of 3-4 students. The number of
participants in 2012 increased in comparison with
previous experiments. Sixteen students, divided into
6 groups of 2-4, were enrolled in 2012. Despite these
differences, the conditions under which the
experiments were carried out were basically similar.
Each experiment started with new writing tasks, but
the students were encouraged to study previous
editions of the course.
5.3 Writing Tasks
The wiki writing tasks were situated within teacher
education, including topics within mathematics,
science, geography, history, and other subjects. The
specificities and technical features of wikis were
introduced to the students during the first week of
the course. Lectures on collaborative writing were
given in the following two weeks. The students were
required to submit their wikis for continuous
evaluation on the basis of the following criteria.
First, the wikis should follow general usability
criteria such as good technical layout, clear linking
and navigation. Second, the wikis must contain
information of good quality, without linguistic,
grammar, and spelling errors. Third, the content of
the wiki should draw on recent curricular
development in teacher education, and include well-
structured study material with images, figures,
tables, lists, and references. Fourth, the wikis should
be self-explaining, and provide information that is
relevant to the target audience. Fifth, the wikis
should contain a minimum of 4000 words to ensure
that a sufficient quantity of writing is produced.
Sixth, the students are required to edit each other’s
contributions, and take actively part in discussion of
the wiki content and structure. Finally, in line with
the wiki philosophy based on collaborations, the
students were not assessed individually, but as a
group working collaboratively. Nevertheless, the
history log can be used to look at the students’
individual contributions to the wikis.
5.4 Data Collection and Analysis
Methods
In an attempt to provide a consistent evaluation of
the experiments, this work used the wiki data log to
collect three types of quantitative data. Firstly, the
level of work distribution among members of the
student groups to assess the amount of work and
frequency produced by each student.
Secondly, the total number of actions per group
Wiki-mediatedCollaborativeWritinginTeacherEducation-AssessingThreeYearsofExperiencesandInfluencing
Factors
7
and category of the taxonomy described in the
theoretical perspective, including their frequencies,
were collected and analysed, such as whether an
action was an addition, deletion or clarification of
content, addition, deletion, or fixation of a link,
formatting, spelling, style, or grammar.
Then, information on work intervals and timing
of contribution were recorded to assess the amount
of work produced by the students over a period of
three years.
Finally, observations and informal discussions
were used to gain supplementary information on
students’ collaborative writing activities.
6 RESULTS
The results are described with respect to the
experiments that were carried out in 2010, 2011, and
2012. The results are reported in terms of level of
distribution, types of actions, and time intervals.
6.1 Level of Work Distribution
Table 1 (Appendix) presents the distribution of work
made by each member of the student groups over a
period of three years (2010-2012).
In 2010, the percentage of contributions ranged
from 39.56% to 16.40% of total activities. One
student in group 1 contributed to almost 40% of the
work, and the rest was distributed among the other
students. In group 2, one student contributed to
87.43%. The same situation occurred in group 3,
where one student contributed to 70.05%.
In 2011, two students in group 3 contributed to
82.53%. In group 2, one student made 46.48% of all
contributions. In contrast, the work was more
equally distributed in group 1 than in the other
groups.
In 2012, a similar distribution of work can be
observed. One student did most of the work in
groups 4, 5, and 6. Two students in group 2 and 3
contributed to more than 80% of the work. The work
contribution of group 1 was evenly distributed for
three students, with the exception of one student
(student 4).
Table 1 (Appendix) enables to see the level of
contribution made by each student in the respective
groups. The table does neither indicate the types of
actions or activities performed by the students, nor
show the level of collaboration among students.
Thus, further analysis is required to gain more
insight into the level of collaborative writing among
the students and the types of actions performed on
the wikis.
6.2 Type of Actions
The analysis of the results shows that the students
carried out all editing actions described in the
taxonomy for collaborative writing (add, modify,
and delete content; add, fix, and delete link; format,
and grammar, style, and spelling) to a certain extent.
Table 2 (Appendix) shows all editing actions
over a period of three years (2010-2012). Note that
grammar, style, and spelling are put together,
because these actions are somehow similar. They
aim at correcting grammar mistakes and spelling,
changing the style, typography, and presentation of
the wiki content. These actions may then be
considered as collaborative actions, though to a
lesser degree than clarifying content, especially
when students contribute to each other’s work.
The most frequent action in 2010 was formatting
(43.90%), followed by add content (18.47%), clarify
content (12.89%), add link (9.99%), delete content
(8.17%), fix link (3.09%), grammar/style/spelling
(2.84%), and delete link (0.65%).
In 2011, the most frequent action was add
content (28.27%), followed by formatting (20.66%),
add link (17.72%), grammar/style/spelling (12.08%),
delete content (8.30%), clarify content (7.49%), fix
link (3.81%), and delete link (1.67%).
In 2012, the most important action was
formatting (23.39%), followed by add content
(20.62%), add link (17.68%), clarify content
(12.04%), grammar/style/spelling (8.59%), fix link
(7.73%), delete content (7.25%), and delete link
(2.70%).
The average result achieved for the three-year
period was a follows. The most frequent action was
formatting (29.32%), followed by add content
(22.45%), add link (15.13%), clarify content
(10.81%), delete content (7.91%),
grammar/style/spelling (7.84%), fix link (4.87%),
and delete link (1.67%). A total of 7304 actions were
performed, and only 853 actions (10.81%) aimed at
genuine collaboration (Table 2, Appendix). If
grammar/style/spelling (456 actions, 7.84%) are
considered as collaborative actions, then the total
number of actions that aimed at collaboration is
1309, that is 18.65% of all actions.
Hence, it appears that cooperation is more
evident that collaboration and that no significant
progress has been made from 2010 to 2012
regarding the action “modify content” (average
score 10.81%). The action started with 12.89%,
CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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decreased in 2011 (7.49%), and increased in 2012
(12.04%). Formatting (29.32%) and add content
(22.45%) were the most important activities over
three years, in contrast to clarify content and
grammar/style/spelling. The evolution of students
groups’ actions over three years confirms the results
(See Figure 1 in the Appendix).
Summarizing, it is obvious that students were
more apt to engage in cooperation rather than
collaboration. Group members mostly worked on
individual sections of the wikis. This reduced their
ability to produce shared knowledge and collective
documents of the wiki tasks. There were few
occasions when the groups worked on the same
section of the wiki by revising substantially each
other’s work. Clearly, this cannot be considered as
genuine collaborative writing, since students rarely
revised or modified each other’s content. Instead,
students were more concerned with formatting,
adding content, formatting the text, and adding links.
6.3 Timing of Contribution
Table 3 (Appendix) shows the timing of
contributions and work intervals over a period of
three years, including the average number of actions
per week. Note that in 2011 and 2012, the workload
for the month of March was distributed over two
weeks, which means that the average number of
actions per week must be divided by 2, and not by 4
as it is the case for the month of May in 2010.
In 2010, Table 3 shows that all groups worked
much as the last deadline approached, and did not
follow the schedule assigned throughout the
experiment period from January, 19 to May, 14. This
was particularly true for group 1 (G1) and group 3
(G3).
In 2011, a similar tendency was observed,
particularly for group 2 (G2) and group 3 (G3), in
stark contrast to group 1 (G1). Also here the average
number of actions performed in March was much
higher than in February and January. This was also
the case in 2012, though to a lesser degree.
As a result, it seems that a slight progression has
occurred from 2010 to 2012 since the amount of
work has not increased drastically the last month in
2012 in comparison to 2011, which itself achieved a
better result than 2010. This, however, does not
automatically mean that students collaborated. It is
more likely that they cooperated as a triangulation of
the timing of contribution seems to indicate.
7 DISCUSSION
A cross-checking of the results shows that the
students did not collaborate much in their attempt to
perform writing tasks. A number of influencing
factors may explain the low level of collaboration.
These may be classified in two broad categories:
Contextual and personal factors.
Contextual factors are those related to the
teacher, technology, assessment procedures, and
learning paradigm.
Personal factors are students’ motivation, prior
knowledge in collaborative writing, and familiarity
with wiki technology.
In addition to influencing factors, some
recommendations are suggested to improve
collaborative writing with wikis.
7.1 Contextual Factors
According to Karasavvidis (2010), the learning
paradigm in higher education is based more on the
behaviourist paradigm than collaborative learning.
Hence, wiki-mediated collaborative writing may be
inhibited when it is introduced into educational
settings where traditional views of learning such as
behaviouristic practices are actually predominant.
As a result, students without sufficient collaborative
skills may be disadvantaged even though
collaborative writing is potentially possible with
wiki technology.
Another factor that may have influenced
students’ collaborative writing activities is the
assessment procedure used to evaluate students’
contributions to the wikis. Since students were
assessed as groups, and not according to their
individual contributions, it is not surprising that
some students did not fully engage in collaborative
writing. As a result, most of the work was done by
some students as the distribution of work clearly
reveals. It is also possible that some students were
more dominant than others (Meishar-Tal & Gorsky,
2010). Clearly, collaborative writing requires more
group assessment, because it may be necessary to
judge individual contributions, which in turn, may
influence positively students’ contributions to
collaborative writing.
The third factor is the wiki technology being
used, that is MediaWiki. While the technology is
based on an interface with a simplified HTML
language, it does not offer an advanced WYSIWYG
editor, which may facilitate the use of wikis. In
addition, the discussion page is not good enough to
promote reflections on collaborative writing,
Wiki-mediatedCollaborativeWritinginTeacherEducation-AssessingThreeYearsofExperiencesandInfluencing
Factors
9
influencing thereby students’ activities performed on
the wikis.
7.2 Personal Factors
The first category of personal factors comprises
perceptions that students hold about wikis,
familiarity with the tool being used, its limitations
and potentialities for collaborative writing (Caple
and Bogle, 2013; Minocha and Thomas, 2007).
Informal discussions and observations revealed that
some students without technical background were
not always comfortable with wikis. On the other
hand, students with solid background in information
technologies were more confident with using wikis.
While students did not feel that they had to know
everything about wikis, they did not deny the
importance of the need to familiarize themselves
with wikis to the extent of knowing what their
functionalities and features are and how to use them
for developing wikis. Some students believed that
pre-work and preparation for wiki use before
entering collaborative writing would have helped
them to tackle some technical problems.
The second personal factor is the students’ lack
of collaborative skills and experience in
collaborative learning. Such skills are indeed
necessary to foster collaborative learning, which is a
prerequisite for collaborative writing. Hence,
collaborative learning should not be limited to wikis
alone but should be possible using any means found
useful, for example let students work together and
discuss a topic that can add to each other’s
knowledge (Tetard et al., 2009).
Another critical factor of success is the students’
motivation to effectively engage in meaningful
collaborative writing (Hadjerrouit, 2013a).
Motivation - as a personal factor - is an essential
component of collaborative writing with wikis.
Observations and informal discussions revealed that
motivated students edited more content and used
more wiki features. It seems that motivation is
closely related to the wiki task itself, whether it is
relevant and meaningful to the student.
7.3 Recommendations
Based on the results and influencing factors, some
recommendations are suggested to help students
engage in genuine collaborative writing using wiki
technology.
Firstly, students need to familiarize themselves
with wiki technology, because not all students
possess sufficient pre-requisite knowledge for using
wikis. Hence, technical training is still needed to
help students acquire the basic knowledge that is
necessary to use wikis for collaborative writing.
Secondly, wiki technology should be improved
to include a WYSIWYG editor and additional
features that facilitate collaborative writing.
Likewise, the discussion page of existing wiki tools
is not good enough to support genuine
communication. It should be improved, and used in
conjunction with other Web 2.0 technologies, such
as Google Talk and Twitter, but also other
communication technologies such as mobile phone,
Skype, and emails.
Another recommendation that may foster
collaborative writing is the students’ preparation and
prior acquisition of basic collaborative skills
(Minocha and Thomas, 2007). Students should have
a sense of how collaboration can be achieved by
following a common goal and coordinating their
efforts under the guidance of the teacher.
Then, in terms of wiki content, student groups
need to be knowledgeable in the topics being studied
in order to create wikis of good quality with relevant
references, because those lacking basic knowledge
in the topic being studied will not be able to truly
contribute to the wiki content. In addition, students
should possess some language proficiency to make
the writing process easier, especially for those with
technical background (Li and Zhu, 2013).
Furthermore, collaborative writing needs to
benefit from clear assessment procedures and
criteria. These may include both peer-assessment
and self-assessment, on individual or group basis. To
be effective, assessment of students’ contributions to
the wiki should be mandatory, and based on pre-
established quality criteria.
Finally, the process of creating wikis needs to be
carefully planned by teachers to guide and sustain
students’ collaborative writing activities. In addition,
to management and planning activities, wiki-based
collaborative writing cannot be successful without a
sound pedagogy based on collaborative learning or
similar learning paradigms such as the sociocultural
approach to learning (Vygotsky, 1978). A
pedagogical strategy that supports genuine
collaborative writing should engage students in
collaborative work and group dynamics to a greater
benefit for the students.
8 CONCLUSIONS
Wikis have the potential to foster collaborative
writing in teacher education, but wiki-mediated
CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
10
collaborative writing is a demanding task that
requires pedagogical changes. These are however
difficult to achieve mainly because contextual and
personal factors, which can act as barriers to
learning, can prevent teacher students from
collaborating. Even if it is impossible to draw any
general conclusions from the experiments that were
performed in 2010, 2011, and 2012, it can be
ascertained that students did not make a real
progress in their attempt to collaborate. To exploit
the full potential of wikis in future experiments, it is
important to guide students into all aspects of wiki-
based collaboration. This entails taking into
consideration both contextual and personal factors,
affecting collaborative writing with wikis, and the
suggested recommendations as well. Moreover,
progress in wiki-based collaborative writing can be
achieved through the iterative and continuous cycle
of experimentations and evaluations in varied
teacher education contexts.
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APPENDIX
Table 1: Students’ work load and distribution (2010-2012).
2010
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Student 1
634 (39.56%) 292 (87.43%) 152 (70.05%)
Student 2
379 (23.64%) 42 (12.57%) 65 (29.95%)
Student 3
327 (20.40%) … …
Student 4
263 (16.40%) … …
Total 1603 (100%) 334 (100%) 217 (100%)
2011
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Student 1
137 (37.23%) 119 (46.48%) 95 (46.12%)
Student 2
118 (32.07%) 74 (28.91%) 75 (36.41%)
Student 3
113 (30.70%) 63 (24.61%) 27 (13.10%)
Student 4
… … 9 (4.37%)
Total 368 (100%) 256 (100%) 206 (100%)
2012
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Student 1
80 (31.25%) 121 (45.66%) 184 (46.58%)
Student 2
76 (29.68%) 107 (40.37%) 166 (42.02%)
Student 3
64 (25.00%) 37 (13.96%) 45 (11.39%)
Student 4
36 (14.06%) … …
Total 256 (100%) 265 (100%) 395 (100%)
Group 4 Group 5 Group 6
Student 1
640 (68.37%) 209 (67.63%) 150 (61.47%)
Student 2
296 (32.95%) 100 (32.36%) 94 (38.52%)
Total 936 (100%) 309 (100%) 244 (100%)
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Table 2: Number and frequency of actions (2010-2012).
Total
2010
Frequency
2010 (%)
Total 2011
Frequency
2011 (%)
Total 2012
Frequency
2012 (%)
Total
2010-2012
Frequency
2010-2012
(%)
Clarify content
418 12.89% 91 7.49% 344 12.04% 853 10.81%
Delete content
265 8.17% 96 8.30% 207 7.25% 568 7.91%
Add content
599 18.47% 309 28.27% 589 20.62% 1497 22.45%
Fix link
100 3.09% 33 3.81% 221 7.73% 354 4.87%
Delete link
21 0.65% 21 1.67% 207 2.70% 249 1.67%
Add link
324 9.99% 178 17.72% 505 17.68% 1007 15.13%
Grammar,
style, spelling
92 2.84% 119 12.08% 245 8.59% 456 7.84%
Formatting
1424 43.90% 228 20.66% 668 23.39% 2320 29.32%
Total actions
3243 100% 1075 100% 2986 100% 7304 100%
Table 3: Average number of actions per week (2010-2012).
2010
G 1 G 2 G 3
Average no. of
actions per week
January (2 weeks) 2 1 0 1.5
February (4 weeks) 26 31 19 19
March (4 weeks) 247 43 30 80
April (4 weeks) 323 55 114 123
May (4 weeks) 966 94 172 308
Total 1564 224 335 106.3
2011
G1 G 2 G 3
Average no. of
actions per week
January (2 weeks) 91 30 4 62.5
February (4 weeks) 187 97 62 86.5
March (2 weeks) 87 129 140 178
Total 365 256 206 109
2012
G 1 G 2 G 3 G 4 G 5 G 6
Average no.
of actions
per week
January
( 2 weeks)
155 11 0 3 0 1 85
February
(4 weeks)
490 207 128 240 148 178 347.75
March
(2 weeks)
291 173 116 21 156 79 418
Total 936 391 244 264 304 258 283.58
Wiki-mediatedCollaborativeWritinginTeacherEducation-AssessingThreeYearsofExperiencesandInfluencing
Factors
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Figure 1: Evolution of student groups’ actions (2010-2012).
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