Abstract
Participation in communities of practice (CoPs) [1], either in face-to-face, or in technology-based environments, leads to the accumulation of experience, stimulates the social construction of knowledge and the development of expertise. An overview over the occurring complex long-term processes may provide means to foster collaboration and social knowledge construction in CoP. In technology-based environments, however, this requires valid and reliable automatic analysis procedures of the community dialogue. In previous work [2], social knowledge-building was analyzed as a cohesion-based collaboration assessment model applied to individual chats. This study extends the procedure after aggregating discussion threads from asynchronous discussion forums and performs a validation by comparison with the results of a manual content analysis based on a critical thinking framework [3]. The developed tool makes headway on applying learning analytics in field research on virtual CoPs.
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Keywords
- Betweenness Centrality
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation
- Latent Semantic Analysis
- Virtual Community
- Importance Score
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
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Weltzer-Ward, L., Baltes, B., Knight Lynn, L.: Assessing quality of critical thought in online discussion. Campus-Wide Information Systems 26(3), 168–177 (2009)
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Nistor, N., Dascalu, M., Trausan-Matu, S., Mihaila, D., Baltes, B., Smeaton, G. (2013). Virtual Communities of Practice in Academia: Automated Analysis of Collaboration Based on the Social Knowledge-Building Model. In: Hernández-Leo, D., Ley, T., Klamma, R., Harrer, A. (eds) Scaling up Learning for Sustained Impact. EC-TEL 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8095. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_82
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_82
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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