I work with a group that uses Knowledge Forum, which is generally held up as a "knowledge building environment". In the interest of fair disclosure: I'm currently the technical lead on the project. We maintain a lot of data about user behaviours, and we tend to write those data into the database itself. That sets us up for being able to use the recorded data as objects of inquiry themselves.
We have a long history of using analytics: our "ATK" (Analytic ToolKit) has been used for over a decade and provides a variety of reports. Please see http://ikit.org/atk/ for an overview.
We have also developed a series of "assessment applets" for Knowledge Forum that use those stored data and present them to the users. See http://analysis.ikit.org/w/index.php/Assessment_Applets for details about those.
The upshot of all this is that we find that feeding the results from the analytics back into the course really changes the dynamics. We've called this "concurrent, embedded and transformative assessment" in the literature about Knowledge Building.
Thank you for posting your applets. I don't think I actually have the vocabulary to describe how useful the vocabulary and writing applets seem. I think for anyone teaching a career or trade related course this could show how and if the individual students and the class as a whole was learning the vocabulary needed in their community of practice. (Sorry, this is coming from someone who has worked for the last four years with WebCT, Blackboard and now Desire2Learn and is happy just to see student tracking of content module access.)
When we were looking at the Next Generation Learning grant at my college, one of our philosophy instructor said they would love to have a tool in the lms that checked to see if the students were doing the reading prior to their submission of essays. They referred to a practice they remembered where they hand to turn in their reading notes to their professors. I could see discussions that used the vocabulary applet would allow the instuctor to ascertain this.
I also think the vocabulary applet going into wish list of learner analytics for this class.