Supporting Knowledge Sharing & Construction in Virtual Learning Communities Styliani Kleanthous Supervisor: Vania Dimitrova School of Computing, University of Leeds

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

Electronic Communities Definition: An online community could be a set of users 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

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

Educational Theories Constructivism Vygotskys Work Situated Cognition Collaboration Cooperation Zone of Proximal Development Cognitive Apprenticeship

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

Important Processes Transactive Memory Shared Mental Models Cognitive Centrality Cognitive Consensus

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? Transactive Memory System Affects group performance Beneficial for newcomers I am new here. What they have been doing before? Transactive Memory in VLC Be able to Know who knows what Locate available knowledge

Shared Mental Models Definition: Members shared and organised understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the teams relevant environment (Mohammed & Dumville, 2001) Yes! I am sure that we have the same understandin g 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)

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?

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

Framework Community Model Community Model AcquisitionCommunity Model Application Tracking Data BSCW + ConDOR Semantically Enriched Data Ontologies Dialogue with user Transactive Memory Shared Mental Models Cognitive Centrality Cognitive Consensus Collective EfficacyInformation SharingLearning Process

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. ( Activity and Event Monitoring Activity Event

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-matrixmap analysis Carley, K.M., & Diesner, J (2006) AutoMap: Software for Network Text Analysis CASOS, CMU.

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)

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)

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

Thank you!