workshop
Analyzing topic evolution in online forums and scaffolding learners to draw concept maps through statistical and semantic techniques
The workshop is jointly organized by CITE and Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. It is sponsored by Tin Ka Ping Visiting Fellowship Scheme. The intended participants for this workshop are staff and students of Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
About the Workshop
Nowadays online discussions and drawing of concept maps are two very common pedagogical designs used by teachers in learning activities. However, keeping track of ideas progression in forums or evaluating concept maps produced by students is a big challenge to teachers who may not have time to read all posts, as well as students who may not have the knowledge to conduct meta-level evaluation to improve their outcome of learning.
The goal of this workshop is to introduce and explore analysis methods that may generate meaningful insights onto these kinds of activity data in order to help teachers or researchers to evaluate students’ engagement and learning. For online discussion forum data, an algorithm base on HLDA on detecting and studying topic evolution in forum postings over a period of time will be presented. For concept maps, the statistical approach and semantic technology were used to mine the concept map for scaffolding users to draw concept map, and possibly evaluate the degree of similarity of concept maps between expert and students. It is hoped that these analysis methods may contribute towards development of assessment tools that can be used by teachers and students to assist learning in online platforms.
<p>Yanyan Li is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Technology at Beijing Normal University. She received her PhD degree in computer software and theory from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include e-learning, semantic Web, computer supported collaborative learning, and text mining. She is the leader of two National Natural Science Fund projects and principal investigator of more than ten academic projects. She has published more than 50 academic papers in journals and conferences, such as the Journal of Educational Technology & Society, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, and Future Generation Computer Systems. Two of her papers have been awarded as the best paper in the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (IEEE ICALT). She is the Program Chair of International Conference IEEE ICALT2013, Chair of "Smart Learning Environment" Seminar (SLE2012) between Canada Athabasca University and Beijing Normal University. She is the sub-conference General Co-Chair of Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education (GCCCE2011&2012), the member of Program Committee of the International Conference including ICHL2010, TEL2011, and T4E2011&2012. She is also the editor assistance at Global Chinese Journal for Computers in Education (GCJCE), and she is the peer reviewer for the British Journal of Educational Technology and editorial board member of the Journal Technology for Education and Learning.</p>