SNAPP presentation at Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference 2011

1. SNAPP: A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TEMPORAL
PARTICIPANT INTERACTION
Ms Aneesha Bakharia, Dr Shane Dawson,
Centre for Educational Innovation Director Arts ISIT,
and Technology, University of Queensland University of British Columbia
Email: a.bakharia1@uq.edu.au Email: sdawson@exchange.ubc.ca
Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2011

2. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 SNAPP essentially serves as a diagnostic instrument, allowing
teaching staff to evaluate student behavioral patterns against
learning activity design objectives and intervene as required in a
timely manner.
LAK2011

3. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 SNA has been demonstrated to assist educators in
identifying instances of:
 learner isolation (McDonald, Stuckey, Noakes, &
Nyrop, 2005)
 creativity (Burt, 2004; McWilliam & Dawson, 2009)
 community formation (Dawson, 2008; Lally, Lipponen,
& Simons, 2007)
LAK2011

4. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 Reffay and Chanier (2002) suggest that SNA can act as
an educational evaluative tool in order to monitor and
assess elements of student group cohesion.
 “Getting a view of the big picture of the social
interactions between students becomes increasingly
difficult as class sizes grow.” (Brooks, et al, 2009)
 “... the understanding of the social relationships between
learners is incredibly important when an educator is
determining how to scaffold the learning content.”
(Brooks, et al, 2009)
How can we realise the potential of real-time
SNA?
LAK2011
Networked Learning Conference 2010

5. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 FORUM A  FORUM B
Both Forum A and B have 14 messages posted by 4 participants
Are there structural differences in terms of interaction?
LAK2011

6. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 FORUM A  FORUM B
• No student interaction • Student to student social
• All interaction via Tutor/Lecturer interaction beginning
• Interpreting the threaded forum view when making decisions regarding
satisfactory levels of peer interaction is difficult (Dawson & McWilliam, 2008)
LAK2011
Networked Learning Conference 2010

7. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 FORUM A  FORUM B
• No student interaction • Student to student social
• All interaction via Tutor/Lecturer interaction beginning
Activation of the SNAPP tool results in the embedding of a social network
visualisation directly below the threaded forum display
LAK2011
Networked Learning Conference 2010

8. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
• Integration with Learning Management Systems
(eg Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn)
• Simple installation and usage
• Render a Sociogram as an alternate
representation of the threaded discussion view
• New in Version 2
• View forum activity over time
• Filter by Date
• Data Export (NetDraw .vna and Gephi .gexf
formats)
• Annotations
LAK2011
Networked Learning Conference 2010

9. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
Client side Browser Tool! Why?
• SNAPP is a BOOKMARKLET
Cross browser and multiple LMS Support
• No server side installation
• Embed within a discussion forum
LMS extension frameworks provide limited
ways in which you can extend current
LMS tools
LAK2011

10. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
DEMONSTRATION
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11. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
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12. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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13. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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14. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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15. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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16. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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17. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
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18. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
LAK2011

19. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Learner Isolation
• Dense interactions between central
nodes
• Instances of no interaction occurring
among isolated individuals.
• Early warning indicator for
teaching staff investigate lack of
interaction
• Intervention may be necessary
to ensure isolated learners are included in the
emerging community
LAK2011

20. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Facilitator Centric Patterns
• Interaction occurs between the
facilitator and individual participants
but not between participants.
• Indication that knowledge sharing and
collaboration may not be occurring
• Question and Answer Forums
(…but more social learning activities may be carried out in
alternate venues)
LAK2011

21. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Non interacting groups
 Structural holes (Burt, 1992)
are an indicator that cliques or
groups are developing
 May represent a diminishing
level of diversity and does increase the likelihood of
group think (Uzzi and Spiro, 2005)
 Continuance of prior relationships
LAK2011

22. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Facilitator Interaction with High Performing
Students
 Facilitator interacting only with
other central participants
 Numerous participants with a low
number of connections exist
 The facilitator has not made an
attempt to reply to un-responded
posts or try to incorporate periphery participants
within the discussion (Dawson, 2009)
LAK2011

23. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
 Learning Activity Evaluation
Social
Network
Analysis
Content
Analysis
Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides insight into relationships and
network density.
Content Analysis (CA) conducted to determine quality of discourse.
Can these techniques be automated?
LAK2011

24. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Future Directions
 Content Analysis
 Behavioural Coding
 Supervised Machine Learning
 Classification Problem
 Support Vector Machine
 Topic Modeling (Find Themes/Concepts)
 Unsupervised Machine Learning
 Clustering Problem
LAK2011

25. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
Behavioural Coding
• Classifying student messages to a coding scheme is tedious and time
consuming
• TagHelper tool assists with automating coding
• Supervised Machine Learning algorithm (Support Vector Machine) is used
• The ‘argumentative knowledge construction’ framework proposed by
Weinberger and Fischer (2006) was used - coding scheme is made up of
four process dimensions (participation, epistemic, argumentative and
social mode)
• Model is trained on a subset of data that has been classified by a human
• Model can then be applied to new student discourse
• Difficult to train a model – need open and shared datasets
Rosé, C., Wang, Y., Cui, Y., Arguella, J., Fischer, F., Weinberger, A., et al. (2007). Analyzing
Collaborative Learning Processes Automatically: Exploiting the Advances of Computational
Linguistics in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. International Journal of Computer-
Supported Collaborative Learning, 3(3), 237-272.
LAK2011

26. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
Topic Modeling
 Algorithms
 Non-negative Matrix Factorisation
 Latent Dirichlet Allocation
 Benefits
 Discover latent themes/concepts/topics
 Cluster words and documents simultaneously
 Documents and words can belong to multiple themes
LAK2011

27. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
 Non-negative Matrix Factorisation
Term-Document Matrix
• Post 1 Word 1 Word 2 Word n
• Post 2 Post 1 1 0 2
Post 2 0 1 0
• Post 3
Post 3 0 1 1
Specify No Themes (k)
Features Matrix Weights Matrix
Word 1 Word 2 Word n Theme 1 Theme 2
Theme 1 0.5 0 1 Post 1 1 0
Theme 2 0 0.5 0 Post 2 0 1
Post 3 0 1
LAK2011

28. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
 Thematic Analysis with NMF and LDA
 Converttext to term-document matrix
 NMF produces
 word-theme matrix
 theme-document matrix
 Allows theme overlap
 Need to specify number
of themes (k)
 Allows for interactivity
LAK2011

29. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
 Example
• NMF used to analyse the discourse produced by 3 groups in a Distributed Leadership
(Moodle LMS)
• All groups were assigned the same topic but were only allowed to discuss the topic within
their group assigned discussion forum
• In comparing the main themes:
• Some groups were discussing content that was more relevant and related to the
task.
• Two groups (FT1 and Dream-ITIN) focused on social networking tools and
social software. The IMAGES group held a more relevant discussion on the
implementation and usage of project and time management software.
• The succinct summary provided by NMF forms the basis for
intergroup knowledge sharing.
Lambropoulos, N., Gourdin, A., & Bakharia, A. (2010). Distributed Leadership Collaboration
Factors to Support Idea Generation in Computer Supported Collaborative eLearning. Human
Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, Accepted - In
Press.
LAK2011

30. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of Temporal
Participant Interaction
 What is Apache Mahout
 Open source
 Machine Learning Java library
 Scalable (Apache Hadoop)
 Framework for developing, testing and deploying large-scale
algorithms
 Classification
 Clustering
 Recommendation
 Evolutionary algorithms
http://mahout.apache.org/
Linux Conf Aus 2011 Presentation
Orchestrating the Intelligent Web - http://blip.tv/file/4732423
LAK2011

31. SNAPP: A Bird’s-Eye View of
Temporal Participant Interaction
• Ms Aneesha Bakharia
Python & Java Programmer
ALTC eResearcher
Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology
University of Queensland
Email: aneesha.bakharia@gmail.com
Blog: http://www.randomsyntax.com
• Dr Shane Dawson
Director Arts ISIT
University of British Columbia
Email: sdawson@exchange.ubc.ca
• Twitter: snappvis
Visit http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing
LAK2011
Networked Learning Conference 2010