SNAPP: A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TEMPORAL PARTICIPANT INTERACTION

Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2011

Ms Aneesha Bakharia, Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology, University of QueenslandEmail: a.bakharia1@uq.edu.au

Dr Shane Dawson, Director Arts ISIT, University of British ColumbiaEmail: sdawson@exchange.ubc.ca

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

SNAPP essentially serves as a diagnostic instrument, allowing teaching staff to evaluate student behavioral patterns against learning activity design objectives and intervene as required in a timely manner.

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

SNA has been demonstrated to assist educators in identifying instances of: learner isolation (McDonald, Stuckey, Noakes,

& Nyrop, 2005) creativity (Burt, 2004; McWilliam & Dawson,

2009) community formation (Dawson, 2008; Lally,

Lipponen, & Simons, 2007)

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Reffay and Chanier (2002) suggest that SNA can act as an educational evaluative tool in order to monitor and assess elements of student group cohesion.

“Getting a view of the big picture of the social interactions between students becomes increasingly difficult as class sizes grow.” (Brooks, et al, 2009)

“... the understanding of the social relationships between learners is incredibly important when an educator is determining how to scaffold the learning content.” (Brooks, et al, 2009)

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How can we realise the potential of real-time SNA?

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FORUM A

Both Forum A and B have 14 messages posted by 4 participants

Are there structural differences in terms of interaction?

FORUM B

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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FORUM A FORUM B• No student interaction• All interaction via

Tutor/Lecturer

• Student to student social interaction beginning

• Interpreting the threaded forum view when making decisions regarding satisfactory levels of peer interaction is difficult (Dawson & McWilliam, 2008)

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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FORUM A FORUM B• No student interaction• All interaction via

Tutor/Lecturer

• Student to student social interaction beginning

Activation of the SNAPP tool results in the embedding of a social network visualisation directly below the threaded forum display

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

• Integration with Learning Management Systems (eg Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn)

• Simple installation and usage• Render a Sociogram as an alternate

representation of the threaded discussion view

• New in Version 2• View forum activity over time• Filter by Date• Data Export (NetDraw .vna and Gephi .gexf

formats)• Annotations

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Client side Browser Tool! Why?

• SNAPP is a BOOKMARKLETCross browser and multiple LMS Support

• No server side installation• Embed within a discussion forum

LMS extension frameworks provide limited ways in which you can extend current LMS tools

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

DEMONSTRATIONLAK2011

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Learner Isolation• Dense interactions between central

nodes• Instances of no interaction occurring

among isolated individuals. • Early warning indicator for

teaching staff investigate lack of interaction

• Intervention may be necessary to ensure isolated learners are included in the emerging community

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Facilitator Centric Patterns• Interaction occurs between the

facilitator and individual participants but not between participants.

• Indication that knowledge sharing and collaboration may not be occurring

• Question and Answer Forums (…but more social learning activities may be carried out in alternate venues)

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Non interacting groups Structural holes (Burt, 1992)

are an indicator that cliques or groups are developing

May represent a diminishing level of diversity and does increase the likelihood of group think (Uzzi and Spiro, 2005)

Continuance of prior relationships

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Facilitator Interaction with High Performing Students

Facilitator interacting only with other central participants

Numerous participants with a low number of connections exist

The facilitator has not made an attempt to reply to un-responded posts or try to incorporate periphery participants within the discussion (Dawson, 2009)

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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Learning Activity Evaluation

Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides insight into relationships and network density.

Content Analysis (CA) conducted to determine quality of discourse.Can these techniques be automated?

Social Network Analysis

Social Network Analysis

Content AnalysisContent Analysis

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Future Directions Content Analysis

Behavioural Coding Supervised Machine Learning Classification Problem Support Vector Machine

Topic Modeling (Find Themes/Concepts) Unsupervised Machine Learning Clustering Problem

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Behavioural Coding• Classifying student messages to a coding scheme is tedious and time

consuming• TagHelper tool assists with automating coding• Supervised Machine Learning algorithm (Support Vector Machine) is used• The ‘argumentative knowledge construction’ framework proposed by

Weinberger and Fischer (2006) was used - coding scheme is made up of four process dimensions (participation, epistemic, argumentative and social mode)

• Model is trained on a subset of data that has been classified by a human • Model can then be applied to new student discourse• Difficult to train a model – need open and shared datasets

Rosé, C., Wang, Y., Cui, Y., Arguella, J., Fischer, F., Weinberger, A., et al. (2007). Analyzing Collaborative Learning Processes Automatically: Exploiting the Advances of Computational Linguistics in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 3(3), 237-272.

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

Topic Modeling Algorithms

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Benefits Discover latent themes/concepts/topics Cluster words and documents simultaneously Documents and words can belong to multiple

themes

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SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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Non-negative Matrix Factorisation

• Post 1• Post 2• Post 3

Word 1 Word 2 Word n

Post 1 1 0 2

Post 2 0 1 0

Post 3 0 1 1

Term-Document Matrix

Specify No Themes (k)

Word 1

Word 2

Word n

Theme 1

0.5 0 1

Theme 2

0 0.5 0

Features Matrix

Theme 1

Theme 2

Post 1 1 0

Post 2 0 1

Post 3 0 1

Weights Matrix

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Thematic Analysis with NMF and LDA Convert text to term-document matrix NMF produces

word-theme matrix theme-document matrix Allows theme overlap

Need to specify numberof themes (k) Allows for interactivity

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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Example• NMF used to analyse the discourse produced by 3 groups in a Distributed

Leadership (Moodle LMS)• All groups were assigned the same topic but were only allowed to discuss the topic

within their group assigned discussion forum

• In comparing the main themes:• Some groups were discussing content that was more relevant and

related to the task. • Two groups (FT1 and Dream-ITIN) focused on social networking tools

and social software. The IMAGES group held a more relevant discussion on the implementation and usage of project and time management software.

• The succinct summary provided by NMF forms the basis for intergroup knowledge sharing.

Lambropoulos, N., Gourdin, A., & Bakharia, A. (2010). Distributed Leadership Collaboration Factors to Support Idea Generation in Computer Supported Collaborative eLearning. Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, Accepted - In Press.

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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What is Apache Mahout Open source Machine Learning Java library Scalable (Apache Hadoop) Framework for developing, testing and deploying large-scale

algorithms Classification Clustering Recommendation Evolutionary algorithms

http://mahout.apache.org/Linux Conf Aus 2011 PresentationOrchestrating the Intelligent Web - http://blip.tv/file/4732423

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal Participant Interaction

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• Ms Aneesha BakhariaPython & Java ProgrammerALTC eResearcherCentre for Educational Innovation and TechnologyUniversity of QueenslandEmail: aneesha.bakharia@gmail.comBlog: http://www.randomsyntax.com

• Dr Shane DawsonDirector Arts ISITUniversity of British ColumbiaEmail: sdawson@exchange.ubc.ca

• Twitter: snappvis

Visit http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing

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