Supporting Knowledge Sharing & Construction in Virtual Learning Communities

1. Supporting Knowledge Sharing & Construction in Virtual Learning Communities Styliani Kleanthous Supervisor: Vania Dimitrova School of Computing, University of Leeds www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/stellak

2. Overview… • Problem & Novelty • Electronic Communities • Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) • Supporting Educational Theories • Concepts • The Framework • Possible Future Directions • Your Feedback

3. Electronic Communities Definition: “An online community could be a set ofusers who communicate using computer-mediated communication and have common interests, shared goals, and shared resources.” (Preece, 2001) • An exceptional approach to bring together people form diverse backgrounds • Provides support for collaboration • Knowledge sharing provides the basis for the creation of shared understanding

4. Virtual Learning Communities Characteristics • Common purpose • Sharing of information and generation of new knowledge • Construction of knowledge • Shared resources • At different stages of their professional/academic life • Dialogue/Interaction/Collaboration • Equal Membership/Leadership

5. Educational Theories Zone of Proximal Development Collaboration Vygotsky’s Work Constructivism Situated Cognition Cooperation Cognitive Apprenticeship

6. What is the Problem? Where is the Novelty? Aim: To develop a computational framework to support knowledge sharing and construction in Virtual Learning Communities Problem: systems that support knowledge processes usually adapt to a single user (Fischer & Ostwald 2001). How can we provide support to be tailored to the community as a whole rather than adapting to individuals

7. Important Processes • Transactive Memory • Shared Mental Models • Cognitive Centrality • Cognitive Consensus

8. Transactive Memory Definition: The set of knowledge processed by group members, coupled with and awareness of who knows what. (Wegner, 1986) Do they know what I know? I am new here. What they have been doing before? • Transactive Memory System • Affects group performance • Beneficial for newcomers • Transactive Memory in VLC • Be able to • Know who knows what • Locate available knowledge

9. Shared Mental Models Definition: “Member’s shared and organised understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s relevant environment” (Mohammed & Dumville, 2001) Yes! I am sure that we have the same understanding • Shared Mental Models in VLC • Form the standards of a community formation • Development of SMM can improves the effectiveness of the group • Improvement of collaborative knowledge exploitation (Puntambekar, 2005), (Hoadley and Kilner, 2005), (Lewis and Allan, 2005)

10. Cognitive Centrality Definition: “The greater the degree of overlap between the information a member holds and information other members hold on average, the greater the degree of centrality for that member” (Kerr & Tindale, 2004) I know all about the central topic of this community • Cognitive Centrality in VLC • At different times members from central become peripheral. What can we do about that?

11. Cognitive Consensus Definition: “the similarity among group members regarding how key issues are defined and conceptualised" (Mohammed & Dumville, 2001) Oh! That’s how you meant it…! Cognitive Consensus in VLC • Same conceptualisation of an issue • It is important in categorisation/classification of resources

12. Framework Community Model Community Model Acquisition Community Model Application Tracking Data BSCW + ConDOR • Semantically Enriched Data • Ontologies Dialogue with user Transactive Memory Shared Mental Models Cognitive Centrality Cognitive Consensus Learning Process Information Sharing Collective Efficacy

13. Sample Data • BSCW server • The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) shared workspace system is a web based groupware system with full document management facilities. • BSCW allows you to improve your internal and external group collaboration. (http://www.bscw.de/index_en.html) • Activity and Event Monitoring • Activity • Event

14. Textual analysis in AutoMap • Input:Text • Output:Maps (XML like files) • Further Use:Input to other tools • e.g. visualisation, comparison, reasoner • How: encodes the links between concepts in a text and builds a network • Analyses:map analysis, meta-matrix, sub-matrix Carley, K.M., & Diesner, J (2006) AutoMap: Software for Network Text Analysis CASOS, CMU.

15. Possible Directions • Dublin Core Metadata Element Set • To represent elements such as: Title, Creator, Subject & Keywords, Format, Date… • Consensus Hierarchies / Folksonomies • Extension of ConDOR (Construction of Dynamic Open Resources)

16. Folksonomies A set of tags defined by Vander Wal (2004) as Folksonomy Underlying idea: Categorisation of documents under keywords/ tags/ informal metadata (Szekely & Torres, 2005) Importance: When many people are sharing documents it is easier to locate what they want (Guy & Tonkin, 2006)

17. Issues to investigate • How to support knowledge sharing & construction based on cognitive perspective • How to represent the knowledge of the group • How to benefit from the visualisations of analysed text • How to extract metadata from the uploaded resources • How to use the extracted metadata • Checking the usefulness of folksonomies to VLC

18. Thank you!