In the search for techniques that support participation in online communities, in this poster we present a visualization tool for a collaborative learning environment which aims at motivating students to engage in online discussions taking place during learning activities. Grounded on social comparison theory, we propose a graph-based visualization that shows communication patterns between users or teams, in a way that it can increase social awareness and enable social comparison about students' level of contribution. This work is in its design phase, so we present the supporting hypotheses of our proposal, expecting to encourage discussion and user feedback in order to proceed with the coming step of conducting a user study over a period of several months.
Promoting participation in online communities is an active research
field. From early research [
In the rest of this document we provide some context by introducing the Kelluwen learning platform where this tool will be implemented, then we provide details of the visualization design, to finally state our conclusions and expectations on the future work.
Kelluwen is a community of students, teachers and researchers
focused on building, using and sharing collaborative didactic designs
that combine traditional classroom activities and the use of social
web tools (the Web 2.0) as didactic resources. This project is
supported by a Web platform, which has been used by a large a group
of vulnerable schools of Southern Chile. The experience we
have gained in a couple of years (2010-2012) shows that the pace of
students’ participation in discussion learning activities decreases
remarkably as the weeks go by [
The proposed visualization (Figure 1) aims to represent the students’ participation while discussing through the Virtual Worklog tool. It will be accessible to all users who are part of the same didactic design execution –i.e., students that belong to the same and twin classes. Each user is depicted as a circular node with her profile photography inside, where its size is proportional to her level of participation along learning activities. As previously said, it is given by the number of written messages in the Virtual Worklog and the number of ’likes’ to peers’ messages.
Since learning activities are carried out by means of collaborative group-work, users can identify teams – defined by the teacher who supervises the activities– by the border color of each node since each color represents a specific group. Moreover, users can change the view in which nodes are deployed in order to see them clustered into groups, thus allowing a team view of their participation (Figure 1a) instead of the individual view (Figure 1b). Furthermore, users (a) Class perspective from team view (b) Self perspective from individual view can choose the perspective that summarizes the users’ participation: the general class perspective (Figure 1a) and the personalized self perspective (Figure 1b), which are described next.
Through the class perspective, users access a holistic view of the participation of all their peers on discussions taken place during learning activities (Figure 1a), providing a high-level representation of the class. Here, user nodes are deployed as a social network, where undirected edges connect pairs of nodes if those users had interacted by either replying a message or ’liking’ one. The information presented here is very general, since the layout position of a node within a social network can’t describe completely the real closeness between users. For that reason, if a user wants to access to a detailed perspective of her own participation data or one of her peers, she can access to the self-centered perspective.
By choosing the self perspective (Figure 1b), users can access detailed data about relationships established among a specific user and all of her peers. Here, the selected user node is depicted at the center of a radial layout, while the other nodes are deployed surrounding it. Like in the class perspective, interaction between users is represented by a connecting edge, a directed one: unidirectional when the proportion of interaction from user A to B is higher than from B to A (using a certain threshold); or bidirectional in case that both proportions of interaction be equitably distributed. Finally, the distance that separates peripheral peer nodes from the center user node reflects the frequency of interaction both established over learning activities. Therefore, the more a pair of users interact over time, the closer they will be located.
We hypothesize that the implementation of the proposed social visualization tool in Kelluwen Web platform can raise social awareness and perhaps activate social comparison in order to stimulate users to engage in an active reciprocal behavior.
The contribution of this work is given proposing a visualization
supported by a survey of successful experiences about social
visualizations within CSCL environments. We will apply our approach
in a different cultural context, since existent studies were not
applied on teenage students under social risk. Moreover, though
visual social network representation has been applied in the analysis
of online learning communities [
The next phase we pursue is the implementation of this visualization tool on the Kelluwen platform and the design of the experiment that will assess its impact on the overall class behavior. The experiment will consist of incorporating this visualization to certain specific classes, measuring the peer interaction reached throughout the activities in a sample of classrooms having and not having access to the visualization. We also want to explore which view –individual or team– and which perspective –class or self-centered– is perceived as simpler to understand. We are interested in telling whether these perspectives are complementary and enrich social navigation or whether users clearly prefer one over the other to explore their participation.