Virtual Communities of Practice in Academia: Automated Analysis of Collaboration Based on the Social Knowledge-Building Model

Abstract

Participation in communities of practice (CoPs) [1], either in face-to-face, or in technology-based environments, leads to the accumulation of experience, stimulates the social construction of knowledge and the development of expertise. An overview over the occurring complex long-term processes may provide means to foster collaboration and social knowledge construction in CoP. In technology-based environments, however, this requires valid and reliable automatic analysis procedures of the community dialogue. In previous work [2], social knowledge-building was analyzed as a cohesion-based collaboration assessment model applied to individual chats. This study extends the procedure after aggregating discussion threads from asynchronous discussion forums and performs a validation by comparison with the results of a manual content analysis based on a critical thinking framework [3]. The developed tool makes headway on applying learning analytics in field research on virtual CoPs.