Yesterday I went to a presentation about Analysing Collaborative Processes and Interaction Patterns in Online Discussions from researchers at the OU. I found myself getting quite fired up, not in a good way, about their early work, which looked at how 12 students had worked on a collaborative task - generating 29 messages ( this was 2001 folks ). They went on to categorise the messages (by hand) like this... Joint knowledge building Asking questions, dialogue extension prompts Supporting with reference or example Acknowledging/ replying / referring to another message Motivation and commitment to task Instructions/information - coordination messages ... and then diagrams were drawn. I then found myself getting all worked up, not in a good way, about the diagrams, in which ( for me ) too much liberty had been taken with the spacial layout of the data, robbing it of potential meaning. For example, orphan messages were collected at the side, when maybe they should have ...
Collaborative Tools Project