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CASE-BASED WORKFLOW MODELING IN SUPPORT OF AUTOMATION THE

TEACHERS’ PERSONAL AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Malinka Ivanova Technical University of Sofia

Mirjam Minor Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

Aim

• To explore the possibilities for activities’ automation of teachers when they use their PLN and this could facilitate their learning

Introduction

• Do you use social networking sites?• What kind of activities do you perform? - search,

interact, share, like/dislike, join groups, etc. • How much time do you spend?• Is it possible to shorten the distance among learning,

effectiveness and time?• What about optimization of teacher’ s behavior

through different techniques for automation?

Introduction

• Exist strong research about use of social networking sites for educational purposes – Activities in PLN (Ivanova et al., 2012) – Twitter in EFL education (Mork, 2009)– Graasp for collaborative learning (Li et al., 2012)– social media for engineering communication (Mehlenbacher et al.,

2010)typical activities performed by teachers and learners are drawn these activities are not structured in any criterion• One example for activities grouping in time (weekly) when

Facebook is utilized as LMS (Wang et al., 2012)

Related work

• effectiveness of teachers' activities in social networks automation functions related to the people and content searching, filtering and recommending

Automation Techniques

• A method for selection of social media content (Twitter) (De Choudhury et al., 2011)

• A system that tracks conversations on social platforms (Facebook and Twitter) and prioritizes posts and messages that are related to a given topic (enterprises) (Ajmera et al., 2013)

• An algorithm that filter content that is most rated and liked - influential users and passive users on Twitter (Romero et al., 2011)

• Personalized item recommendation widget (Guy et al., 2010) - recommendations are done after collecting the relationships among people, tags and items

• Recommender system based on user-model (Seth and Zhang, 2008) • A framework with a possibility to summarize Twitter stream messages,

retirement of messages and their reconstruction around a given topic (Yang et al., 2012)

Types of Users in Social Networks

• (Brandtzæg and Heim, 2011) - five groups: sporadic, lurkers, socialisers, debaters and actives according to their performed activities and level of participation

• (Guo et al., 2009) - users’ behavior is related to daily and weekly contributions through posting - the authors propose models describing how users create links and how their networks progress in time

• (Lang and Wu, 2011) research the factors that are important for lifetime forming - active and passive lifetime according to users’ activities and behavior

• For purposes of our research: – users of social networking sites – passive (learn by

observation ) and active (participate)– with different level of activeness in different time

of their learning sessions according to their learning priorities and goals

– users possess favorite activities

learning optimization recommendations with structured activities

Criterion and procedure for generation of structured workflows

Understanding the favorite activities in SNS

Understanding the favorite activities in SNS

User modelpreferencesUser modelpreferences

passive userpassive user

active useractive user

time, learning priority

recomm

endationsrecom

mendations

to satisfy passiveto satisfy passive

to motivate passive to be active

to motivate passive to be active

to satisfy activeto satisfy active

• Two different sets with activities typical for passive and active users are created– passive user - a person who prefers to learn alone without getting

advantages of participation and communication– passive users learn through observation: read the shared

knowledge, accept or not friendships, follow people, monitor activity, track activity stream, use applications with special purposes, search

– active users – perform activities that contributes to enrichment of the network knowledge: add comments, publish content/opinion, share link/file, like/dislike, join/create groups, use chat, communicate via direct messaging or other applications, extend contacts, make friendships

Serendipity, Accidental and Intentional Learning

• Usually, learning in SNS occurs accidentally and in a serendipitous way – it is unique for every PLN

• Every teacher sees different stream of messages and receive different information

This fact influences on learning curiosity and changing learning needs

• Kop (2012) - recommenders, RSS aggregators and microblog platforms are effective means of facilitating serendipitous learning on open online networks

• Teachers have control on their PLN organization, but also they are in touch with unexpected information sources

• At this moment serendipity is not automated, just serendipitous content and contacts could be recommended

• PLNs are created intentionally according to the teachers’ interests and future plans they strive to be connected to people who are sources of topic related content

• intentional disposition of PLNs and serendipitous events and processes teachers respond to serendipitous events in intentionally topic-driven PLN

serendipitous eventserendipitous event

Is it my topic?Is it my topic?passive userpassive user

active useractive user

case-based workflowscase-based workflows

process itprocess it

ignore itignore it

yes

no

Serendipitous events in intentionally topic-driven PLN

RESEARCH METHODS

• the design-oriented paradigm of business informatics (Hevner et al., 2004)– It aims at conducting a feasibility study on whether workflow technology is

applicable in order to partly automate the work of teachers in PLN’s • Following a build-and-evaluate cycle (Hevner et al. 2004), a workflow

model for learning procedures within PLNs is created (during the build phase)

• its technical feasibility is tested by deriving a couple of workflow instances from the activities observed in recent PLNs (during the evaluate phase)

• The results of this technical feasibility study are a prerequisite for our future work

• The main research questions are: – Representation: How can activities of teachers in social networks be represented

and structured in a workflow model? – Applicability: Can the workflow model be populated by cases (workflow instances)

for different learning scenarios and user types?

Modelling Workflows

• workflows - “the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules” (WFMC, 1999)

• Recently, a broader notion is emerging, where a workflow describes any flow of activities

• This notion includes the activities of a learner during the use of a PLN

• Workflows are stored in form of cases• Any case could be reused and modified• A new case could be created from existing cases

Workflow 1: Getting to know a new subtopic from the topic

• Workflow 1 for a passive user

Workflow 1: Getting to know a new subtopic from the topic

• Workflow 1 for a passive user with an intention to be activated

Workflow 1: Getting to know a new subtopic from the topic

• Workflow 1 for an active user

Workflow 2: Getting feedback for slides

• Workflow 2 for an active user

Workflow 3: Discover an expert for a topic

• Workflow 3 for a passive user

Workflow 3: Discover an expert for a topic

• Workflow 3 for a passive user with an intention to be activated

Workflow 3: Discover an expert for a topic

• Workflow 3 for an active user

Conclusions

• modeling of structured activities in time and space and according to the learning priority and learning needs utilizing case-based workflow technology

•The workflows are originated from serendipitous events and they are categorized according to the user type

•These workflows describe important cases of activities performed during the PLNs organization and utilization

•They will support teachers through recommendations and guidance giving, making their learning more effective

• They figure the main functions for activities’ automation and semi-automation facilitating the teachers’ personal and social behavior

• The created workflows are the first step in the process of software development

Thank you for your attention!