Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 86
Visualizing Knowledge Networks in Online Courses
Interactive 1. Comparative Corpus Diagrams.
Finally, in Figure 7, we show comparative
corpora for responseLevel – the
level of the conversation tree at which the
discussant contributes each response. The
slightly cooler cast to Renlit’s corpus indicates
that Renlit tends to participate somewhat
later in a thread than Loret – compare,
for example, at L2 (orange) and L4 (light
green). Note also that Loret and Renlit each
have four responses at L1, indicating that
they have each initiated four threads. Naya,
on the other hand, has no posts at L1 because
instructors do not typically respond
directly to their own discussion prompts.
This may seem self-evident, but it is encouraging
to see an intuitive result illustrated
so plainly in the data. Finally, to the
question of Loret as a student who presents
as instructor-like in certain ways, what happens
if we disregard the L1 responses in the
Loret and Renlit diagrams? The remainder
of Loret’s corpus falls somewhat between
Naya’s and Renlit’s for wordCountAvg, as
well as for the distribution of responseLevels.
For example, Loret’s proportion of L2
to L4 posts is much more similar to Naya’s
than it is to Renlit’s.
D. RQ1 Discussion
A
simple graph traversal, derived
from the schema shown in Figure 3,
can yield a participant corpus data
structure that is amenable to visual and statistical
analysis. The examples above show
that comparative corpus diagrams can be
used as exploratory tools for generating
rough insights about individual differences
among discussants, and as useful models to
support reasoning about individuals. They
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