Scaffolding Educational Community of Practice Using Visual Storytelling

• Публикации Патаракина Евгения
  • Patarakin E. Scaffolding Educational Community of Practice Using Visual Storytelling ICEGOV ’17 / New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2017. – 355–358 p.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the transition from single socio-educational projects to educational community of practice. Visual storytelling augmented with sociograms helps community contributors to understand the social structure of interaction which in many respects is determining the success of collaboration. Using a combination of logfile analysis and social network analysis, we have gained insights into the effective design of a collaborative documents improvement system, which fosters the creation and growth of community of practice.

INTRODUCTION

Social networks attract attention of researchers, and social network analysis is used in various spheres. However, data on relations between collaboration participants and social network analysis techniques are hardly used for crowdsourcing practices. It comes from the impression that the data is hard to access or the methods are too complicated. In this paper we present simple methods of analytics based on the data on collaboration as well as on the methods of creating static graphs and dynamic models. The source material for the research is log records, which are a by-product of crowdwriting process.

Governance and society need co-creative projects with a final document as the end output of the collective activities. In a contemporary society only regulations and laws, developed in a real collaboration with citizens, whose life they regulate, may become functional. A contemporary understanding of a society implies that its most active and devoted citizens are really concerned about lawmaking and public governance. Education needs co-creative projects with XXI skills as the learning outcomes of the collective activities. All these needs lead to the emergence of new type mixed projects - socio-educational co-creative projects. We believe that socio-educational co-creative projects are not only productive environments but developmental environments also. As John Raven wrote “in developmental environments people can think about their organizations and their society and come to understand and perceive these institutions (and their operation) in new ways that have marked implications for their own behavior”

Nature, science and technology are permeated with networks, and we will never understand complex systems unless we develop a deep understanding of the networks behind them. A working definition of network science is the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena [3]. Deep understanding of collaboration may begin with mapping activities of participants. We make maps not just of the physical world but also of our social worlds . Network science and diagrams methodology help us to analyze and discuss situations that develop during a network collaboration in different domains. Analysts in this field have established Social Network Analysis (SNA) as an empirical method to study the ties between actors in the network. SNA uses various concepts to evaluate different network properties like centrality, connectivity, cliques, etc. A sociogram is a powerful analysis tool, helping researchers identify points of interest and other structural properties that otherwise would not be obvious in numeric data. We can use data analytics to monitor a network of relationships, which develops as a result of collaborative editing articles.

EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

We regard this crowd of participants as a huge educational community of practice. Users of the edu.crowdexpert.ru are connected to one another through the artifacts that they create, as well as the projects to which they participate. Projects are also connected to one another, through the people who take part in them. From the perspective of the community of practice participants who connect different projects are especially significant. The look at the Edu.Crowdexpert.ru as a community of practice gives us the opportunity to use it in of similar collaborative constructionist environments.

Constructionism argues that learning occurs best when constructing a public artifact. Public entity or a public artifact can be not only examined or discussed but it can also be used by other people. I.e. a public artifact is inherently shareable. Comparing the known learning communities close to the constructionism theory allows us to see that almost all of them use the idea of a cycle or a spiral of actions performed by agents over objects of actions:

As a rule modern socio-technical systems in which the collaborative activity is carried out, store the full history of all activities. In general terms, this history can be presented as a record of a chess or go game, consisting of many moves. Each move in the socio-educational project on the platform Edu.Crowdexpert.ru contains three required elements: Agent ID | Object ID | Type of an action (Writing, Editing, Every action of an agent towards an object leads to the formation of a link between them. If the agents perform action over one and the same object they become agents of the collaborative activity, indirectly linked with one another by the mutual object of activity. The collaborative activity network could be presented as the bipartite graph combining agents with objects of collaborative activity.

SOCIOGRAMS IN ACTION

(?) Sociogram as a tool for storytelling (?) pre

Community of practice needs ongoing scaffolding and management. One of the oldest methods of transmitting knowledge across people is storytelling. The role of narration and the meaning of the practice of narration for various fields of activity were stressed by J.S. Bruner [18]. We believe that storytelling can effectively allow teammate collaboration. Teams whose members receive a story have more similar team mental models than teams whose members do not receive a story [19]. Therefore, we weekly newsletter to all participants of the edu.crowdexpert.ru the stories of what is happening in the platform. At the beginning the stories contained only text and links to new materials published on the platform. And then we had to add to these stories maps showing the structure of collaborative activities. To create these maps different analysis and visualization applications have been used. There is a variety of software tools that have been developed to support analysis of network structures. In our work, we have chosen tools that allow us to easily identify the stable patterns in the field of collaborative work, as well as to track and analyze the dynamics of sociograms, to select the participants among stable patterns for their targeted management.

The analysis of the activity of each participant inside the acting community combined by mutual story or mutual game, allows us linking the act of activity and the development of one participant with the development of the whole community.

We did not use metrics (clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality, etc) on purpose to avoid attracting the attention of participants to the special terms and numbers. Visual storytelling augmented with sociograms does not result in immediate changes in users’ behavior. However, we observe that the participants begin to compare the social structure of the various projects and discuss them on the basis of sociograms.

CONCLUSION

The received results of our research can be used for project management collaborative network development; management of network communities, in case the organization’s activity is focused on the creation and improvement of user-generated content development; management of organization, in case the organization is associated with the creation and improvement of its internal documents.