Productive re-use of CSCL data and analytic tools to provide a new perspective on group cohesion

Christophe Reffay (1) , Christopher Teplovs (1) , François-Marie Blondel (1)

1 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)

The goals of this paper are twofold: (1) to demonstrate how previously published data can be re-analyzed to gain a new perspective on CSCL dynamics and (2) to propose a new measure of social cohesion that was developed through improvements to existing analytic tools. In this study, we downloaded the Simuligne corpus from the publicly available Mulce repository. We improved the Knowledge Space Visualizer (KSV) to deepen the notion of cohesion by using a dynamic representation of sociograms. The Calico tools have been used and extended to complete this cohesion measure by analyzing lexical markers. These complementary analyses of cohesion, based on clique sizes and communication intensity on the one hand, and lexical markers on the other hand, offer more detailed information on (a) the relationships between participants and (b) the structure and intensity of communication. In particular, the analyses highlight strong convergences that were not visible in the previous analysis.

Keywords: Social Network Analysis; Research Data Reuse; Lexical Analysis; Discussion forum; Simuligne; Knowledge Space Visualizer

Domains: Education

Christophe Reffay, Christopher Teplovs, François-Marie Blondel. Productive re-use of CSCL data and analytic tools to provide a new perspective on group cohesion. 9th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Jul 2011, Hong Kong, China. pp.846-850. ⟨edutice-00616547v2⟩