Student Support in Web 2.0 CSCL: an exploratory proposal using Interaction Analysis

Περίληψη

The development and availability of Web 2.0 applications, like blogs, set new challenges and opportunities for the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning community. This paper aims to investigate the possibility of implementing Interaction Analysis techniques in educational group-blogging systems, as a tool for supporting students. To this end, the paper presents a case study evaluating an Interaction Analysis toolkit for blogs, called GIANT, in terms of general usability, usefulness and user interface satisfaction. Overall, research results indicate that students were to a large extent satisfied with their blogging experience, rating the automatically generated Interaction Analysis graphs as useful, easy to understand and decode, thus supporting our initial hypothesis that Interaction Analysis is an important module of any blog-based CSCL setting.