Web Science guest lecture

Using Web Science for Educational Research(and vice versa :-)

Dr Christian Bokhove

About me

• Dr Christian Bokhove

• Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Southampton Education School

• Background maths and computer science, teacher secondary school for years

• Use of ICT to support learning

• Use of technology for analysing learning

Aim of this presentation

• Impression of 4 topics I’m (more or less ;-) working on

• Topics transcend education

A. Modeling software and analyzing children’s drawings (with University of Twente, Netherlands)

B. Educational datamining: mining log files, automatic text book analysis

C. Social network analysis (classrooms, organizations)

(D. Tools for data analysis)

A. Modeling software

• After visit of Prof. Van Joolingen

• SimSketch: www.modeldrawing.eu

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Analyzing drawingsEXAMPLE 1

EXAMPLE 2(Prof. van Joolingen)

Challenge

• We have modelling software that produces drawings/models

• Can we do analyses of drawings automatically?

• So: datamining, pattern recognition?

• Project to work on improving modeling software and automatic analysis

B. Educational datamining

• Log files, electronic books, student actions

• What can we say about their ‘learning behaviour’? Or about textbooks?

• Learning Analytics/datamining: using algorithms to explore this

Example 1

• Log files with student activity

• Classification, predictions (e.g. bored, on-task, Ryan Baker has done a lot of work on this)

• European project where Learning Analytics important role

USING RAPIDMINER

Example 2

• Online resources or a textbook (non-edu: tweets)

• Can we extract its meaning?

• e.g. Latent semantic analysis

USING R

Challenge

• A lot of digital resources are used in education; they create a lot of data (‘Big Data’)

• What can we learn from usage?

• Project to work on using aforementioned methodologies to analyze student work

C. Social Network Analysis

• Started with social sciences (networks)

• Then Watts and Strogatz took it into physics

• Now very multidisciplinary

• See Freeman (2004)

• Dynamic Social Network Analysis: over time, statistical models, simulations, animations

Freeman, L.C. (2004). The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science. Vancouver: Empirical Press.

Example

• Using toolso Ro Gephio nodeXLo UCIneto Pajeko ….McFarland, D.A. (2001). Student Resistance: How the Formal and Informal Organization of Classrooms Facilitate Everyday

Forms of Student Defiance. American Journal of Sociology107(3), 612-78.Moody, J., McFarland, D.A., & Bender-deMoll, S. (2005). Dynamic Network Visualization: Methods for Meaning with

Longitudinal Network Movies. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 1206-1241.Snijders, T.A.B. (2001). The Statistical Evaluation of Social Network Dynamics.Sociological Methodology, 31(1).361-395.

Challenge

• Use existing methodologies from Social Network Analysis (SNA) and apply them to social sciences (here: education)

• Use existing metrics from SNA to explore (community) patterns and new metrics (for me: for educational effectiveness, for example)

• Project proposal to apply SNA to educational context

D. Tools for data analysis

• Would also love to build capacity for all these tools we useo Ro Rapidminero nodeXL, Gephi, UCInet, Pajeko etc.

Let me know, we can look at the options: C.Bokhove@soton.ac.ukBuilding 32 Room 2035

Heard something interesting?