=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Visualizing
Student Participation in a Collaborative Learning Environment
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1210/SP2014_10.pdf
|volume=Vol-1210
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ht/BarriaSP14
}}
==Visualizing
Student Participation in a Collaborative Learning Environment==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1210/SP2014_10.pdf
Visualizing Student Participation in a Collaborative
Learning Environment
Jordan Barría Eliana Scheihing Denis Parra
Universidad Austral de Chile Universidad Austral de Chile PUC Chile
General Lagos 2086, Valdivia General Lagos 2086, Valdivia Vicuña Mackenna 4860
jordanbarriap@gmail.com escheihi@uach.cl dparra@ing.puc.cl
ABSTRACT the Kelluwen platform. It will emphasize graphically aspects that
In the search for techniques that support participation in online we hope can act as feedback and activate social comparison among
communities, in this poster we present a visualization tool for a users.
collaborative learning environment which aims at motivating stu-
dents to engage in online discussions taking place during learning In the rest of this document we provide some context by introdu-
activities. Grounded on social comparison theory, we propose a cing the Kelluwen learning platform where this tool will be im-
graph-based visualization that shows communication patterns bet- plemented, then we provide details of the visualization design, to
ween users or teams, in a way that it can increase social awareness finally state our conclusions and expectations on the future work.
and enable social comparison about students’ level of contribution.
This work is in its design phase, so we present the supporting hy- 2. KELLUWEN PROJECT
potheses of our proposal, expecting to encourage discussion and Kelluwen is a community of students, teachers and researchers fo-
user feedback in order to proceed with the coming step of conduc- cused on building, using and sharing collaborative didactic designs
ting a user study over a period of several months. that combine traditional classroom activities and the use of social
web tools (the Web 2.0) as didactic resources. This project is sup-
Categories and Subject Descriptors ported by a Web platform, which has been used by a large a group
[Applied Computing ]: Education — Collaborative Learning; of vulnerable schools of Southern Chile. The experience we ha-
[Human-centered Computing]: Visualization—Visualization de- ve gained in a couple of years (2010-2012) shows that the pace of
sign and evaluation methods students’ participation in discussion learning activities decreases
remarkably as the weeks go by [1]. This participation is reflected
Keywords by posting messages, replying those messages and ’liking’ them
Social visualization, Social comparison, Collaborative learning through the Virtual Worklog tool[4]. Another issue identified was
the evident lesser rate of interaction established between students
belonging to twin classes (geographically remote classes who exe-
1. INTRODUCTION cute the same didactic design at the same time period) compared
Promoting participation in online communities is an active research students in the same class, at the expense of the benefits provided
field. From early research [6] to most recent works [8], it has been by this source of feedback and opinion sharing. Therefore, we seek
shown that engaging people to participate is not a simple task, sin- for an strategy that increases students’ participation in order to sup-
ce usually a small proportion contribute actively and the rest of port our main project goal: improving socio-communicative skills
the users, the largest proportion, become lurkers who contribute in students through the use of ICT in their classes [1].
very little or nothing. There are a few existent works on promoting
user participation within online learning communities by means of
information visualization [9, 3, 5] to reflect students’ progress as 3. VISUALIZATION DESIGN
well as their contribution to the learning activities. This implies The proposed visualization (Figure 1) aims to represent the stu-
that users’ participation data are represented in an informative way dents’ participation while discussing through the Virtual Worklog
being accessible to every community member, establishing a social tool. It will be accessible to all users who are part of the same di-
visualization. Social comparison theory [2] is usually cited in sup- dactic design execution –i.e., students that belong to the same and
port of the successful outcome of these approaches [9, 3], which twin classes. Each user is depicted as a circular node with her pro-
states that people tend to compare their achievements with people file photography inside, where its size is proportional to her level
who they think are similar to them, leading to an improved perfor- of participation along learning activities. As previously said, it is
mance. Similarly, in [5] social comparison is mentioned as a result given by the number of written messages in the Virtual Worklog
of enabling group awareness, but it focuses on studying the po- and the number of ’likes’ to peers’ messages.
sitive influence of raising student participation awareness on their
collaborative behavior through a visualization tool. Considering the Since learning activities are carried out by means of collaborative
aforementioned works, we propose the implementation of a social group-work, users can identify teams – defined by the teacher who
visualization tool focused on increasing awareness on classmates supervises the activities– by the border color of each node since
and teachers participating in a b-learning community supported by 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
Figure 1: The two perspectives (class and self-centered) of visualization from team and individual view respectively. Users can change from
team view to individual view (and viceversa) by using the checkbox at the right top corner of the tool (a and b). Users can switch class to self
perspective clicking on an specific user node (a), and from self to class perspective clicing outside radial layout displayed (b)
can choose the perspective that summarizes the users’ participation: tives to represent users interaction which can be accessed through
the general class perspective (Figure 1a) and the personalized self the same visualization in a dynamic way. Finally, we will study
perspective (Figure 1b), which are described next. the effect of this approach on students’ participation rather than its
usefulness on teachers.
3.1 Class Perspective
The next phase we pursue is the implementation of this visualiza-
Through the class perspective, users access a holistic view of the
tion tool on the Kelluwen platform and the design of the experiment
participation of all their peers on discussions taken place during
that will assess its impact on the overall class behavior. The experi-
learning activities (Figure 1a), providing a high-level representa-
ment will consist of incorporating this visualization to certain spe-
tion of the class. Here, user nodes are deployed as a social network,
cific classes, measuring the peer interaction reached throughout the
where undirected edges connect pairs of nodes if those users had
activities in a sample of classrooms having and not having access to
interacted by either replying a message or ’liking’ one. The infor-
the visualization. We also want to explore which view –individual
mation presented here is very general, since the layout position of
or team– and which perspective –class or self-centered– is percei-
a node within a social network can’t describe completely the real
ved as simpler to understand. We are interested in telling whether
closeness between users. For that reason, if a user wants to access
these perspectives are complementary and enrich social navigation
to a detailed perspective of her own participation data or one of her
or whether users clearly prefer one over the other to explore their
peers, she can access to the self-centered perspective.
participation.
3.2 Self Perspective 5. REFERENCES
By choosing the self perspective (Figure 1b), users can access detai- [1] Luis Cárcamo, Eliana Scheihing, and Camila Cárdenas. Didáctica 2.0.
led data about relationships established among a specific user and La Web Social en el aula. Ediciones Kelluwen, 2013.
all of her peers. Here, the selected user node is depicted at the center [2] Leon Festinger. A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human
of a radial layout, while the other nodes are deployed surrounding Relations, 7(2):117–140, May 1954.
it. Like in the class perspective, interaction between users is repre- [3] I-Han Hsiao, Julio Guerra, Denis Parra, Fedor Bakalov, Birgitta
sented by a connecting edge, a directed one: unidirectional when König-Ries, and Peter Brusilovsky. Comparative social visualization
for personalized e-learning. In Proceedings of the International
the proportion of interaction from user A to B is higher than from Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pages 303–307.
B to A (using a certain threshold); or bidirectional in case that both ACM, 2012.
proportions of interaction be equitably distributed. Finally, the dis- [4] Katherine Inalef, Julio Guerra, and Eliana Scheihing. Development
tance that separates peripheral peer nodes from the center user node and Validation of a Virtual Worklog as a Collaboration Tool for the
reflects the frequency of interaction both established over learning Kelluwen Learning Community. In Trust, Security and Privacy in
activities. Therefore, the more a pair of users interact over time, the Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2012 IEEE 11th
closer they will be located. International Conference on, pages 1936–1941. Ieee, June 2012.
[5] Jeroen Janssen, Gijsbert Erkens, and P.A. Kirschner. Group awareness
tools: It’s what you do with it that matters. Computers in Human
We hypothesize that the implementation of the proposed social vi- Behavior, 27(3):1046–1058, 2011.
sualization tool in Kelluwen Web platform can raise social aware- [6] Jenny Preece, Blair Nonnecke, and Dorine Andrews. The top five
ness and perhaps activate social comparison in order to stimulate reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone.
users to engage in an active reciprocal behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 20(2):201–223, March 2004.
[7] Reihaneh Rabbany, Mansoureh Takaffoli, and Osmar Zaïane. Social
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4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Student Participation. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter,
The contribution of this work is given proposing a visualization (2):20–29.
supported by a survey of successful experiences about social visua- [8] Julita Vassileva. Motivating participation in social computing
lizations within CSCL environments. We will apply our approach applications: a user modeling perspective. User Modeling and
in a different cultural context, since existent studies were not ap- User-Adapted Interaction, 22(1-2):177–201, March 2012.
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