Unraveling idea development in discourse trajectories

Conference Theme: The Future of LearningShort Paper Session: SP 6.7With the present paper we want to shed light onto an issue that is central within the knowledge building theory but only little studied – the development of ideas in collaborative learning discourse. Starting from the construction of a network of explicit and implicit relations between ideas, we apply a scientometric method to tackle the temporality of collaborative processes based on the structure of successive ideas. The resulting discourse trajectories are shown to give a holistic and also a detailed view on how knowledge advances when their interpretation is combined with a qualitative analysis of the content of the ideas and their relations. The weighted relevance of relations between ideas enables the identification of sub-topics in the discourse, important ideas, and influence or uptake events.postprintThe 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2012), Sydney, Australia, 2-6 July 2012. In ICLS 2012 Proceedings, 2012, v. 2, p. 162-16

How structure shapes dynamics: knowledge development in Wikipedia--a network multilevel modeling approach.

Using a longitudinal network analysis approach, we investigate the structural development of the knowledge base of Wikipedia in order to explain the appearance of new knowledge. The data consists of the articles in two adjacent knowledge domains: psychology and education. We analyze the development of networks of knowledge consisting of interlinked articles at seven snapshots from 2006 to 2012 with an interval of one year between them. Longitudinal data on the topological position of each article in the networks is used to model the appearance of new knowledge over time. Thus, the structural dimension of knowledge is related to its dynamics. Using multilevel modeling as well as eigenvector and betweenness measures, we explain the significance of pivotal articles that are either central within one of the knowledge domains or boundary-crossing between the two domains at a given point in time for the future development of new knowledge in the knowledge base