Using Social Network Analysis to gain insight into social creativity while designing digital mathematics books

Analysing the processes and products of creativity to better understand and support individuals and teams, is a difficult and elusive challenge despite years of research in creativity. In this article, we are particularly interested in social creativity in communities of interest. Building on Guilford's classic model of Divergent Thinking of fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration, we employ Social Network Analysis to model the creative design process. The creative process in the current study takes place in a technological environment called the ‘MC-squared platform’, in which members of a community of interest collaborate in a social, co-creative process for designing digital, mathematical textbooks. Both the technological environment and the methodology are exemplified through two case examples, one on the design process of a digital book about a bioclimatic amusement park and one on the design process of a digital book about fractions. We conclude that, for these examples, both the technological tool and the data analysis approach provide insight into the social creativity process of the community of interest

Representation of virtual choreographies in learning dashboards of interoperable LMS analytics

Learning management systems (LMS) collect a large amount of data from user interaction, and it isn't easy to analyze this data in a reliable and context-independent manner. This research seeks to comprehend how virtual choreographies can be represented in interoperable LMS analytics dashboards. In order to gain a better understanding of the problem, this objective has been divided into three sub-goals: determining which interactions can be gathered from LMS contexts, identifying virtual choreographies from LMS logs, and representing virtual choreographies in learning dashboards. To achieve these objectives, we first conducted a Systematic Literature Review to comprehend the behaviors and interactions other authors have investigated in LMS contexts. Then, by applying these findings to this dissertation's case study, a methodical procedure for extracting valuable choreographies from the logs was outlined. The Design Science Research methodology was then applied to transforming logs into virtual choreographies and their representation in learning dashboards. It was implemented two services: one responsible for identifying virtual choreographies from data logs and transforming the logs into statements, recipes, and choreographies, following xAPI specification elements; and the other translates the information from the backend service into dashboard visualizations, allowing the user to view representations for statements, recipes, choreographies, and various visualizations. These artifacts provide a new flexible and cost-efficient solution for the identification of virtual choreographies, thereby facilitating the widespread adoption of their use

CollabGraph: A graph-based collaborative search summary visualisation

Currently, the search history in search engines is presented in a list view of some combination of enumerated results by title, URL, or search query. However, this classical list view is not ideal in collaborative search environments as it does not always assist users in understanding collaborators' search history results and the project's status. We present CollabGraph, a system for graph-based summary visualization in collaborative search learning environments. Our system differentiates from existing solutions by visualizing the summary of the collaboration results in a graph and having its core personal knowledge graphs (PKGs) for each user. Our research questions concentrate around the CollabGraph's usefulness, preference, and enhancement of participation of student's and teacher's feedback compared to the list view of search history results. We evaluate our approach with an online questionnaire in six different project-based searching as learning (SaL) scenarios (LSs). The evaluation of users' experience indicates that the CollabGraph is useful, highly likeable, and could benefit users' participation and teacher's feedback by providing more precise insights into the project status. Our approach helps users better perceive about everyone's work, and it is a highly preferable feature alongside the list view. In addition, the results demonstrate that graph summary visualizations, such as the CollabGraph, are more suitable for closed-end scenarios and collaborative projects with many participants

Analyzing students’ collaboration patterns in a social learning environment using StudentViz platform

Abstract Understanding students’ collaboration patterns is an important goal for teachers, who can thus obtain an insight into the collaborative learning process. Social network analysis and network visualizations are commonly used for exploring social interactions between learners. However, most existing network visualization platforms are deemed too complex by the teachers, who do not possess social network analysis expertise. Therefore, we propose an easy to use platform for visualizing students’ collaboration patterns, called StudentViz. An overview of the tool, including a description of its implementation and functionalities, is provided in the paper. An illustration of how the tool can be used in practice, for investigating students’ collaboration patterns in a social learning environment, is also included