M. Spaniol et al. (Eds.): ICWL 2009, LNCS 5686, pp. 386–389, 2009.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
Using the Social Web to Supplement Classical Learning
Stefan Trausan-Matu, Vlad Posea, Traian Rebedea, and Costin Chiru
“Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
313 Splaiul Independentei, Bucharest, Romania
{stefan.trausan,vlad.posea,traian.rebedea,
costin.chiru}@cs.pub.ro
Abstract. The paper describes a complex e-learning experiment that has in-
volved over 700 students that attended the Human-Computer Interaction course
at the “Politehnica” University of Bucharest during the last 4 years. The
experiment consisted in using social web technologies like blogs and chat con-
ferences to engage students in collaborative learning. The paper presents the
learning scenario, the problems encountered and the tools developed for solving
these problems and assisting tutors in evaluating the activity of the students.
The results of the experiment and of using the blog and chat analysis tools are
also covered. Moreover, we show the benefits of using such a scenario for the
learning community formed by the students that attended this course in order to
supplement the classical teaching and learning paradigm.
Keywords: Social Web, E-learning, Evaluation, CSCL, Blog, Chat.
1 Introduction
The Social Web [1] (or Web 2.0) provides complex applications that allow people to
create and share content, to discuss, and group themselves into communities. A natu-
ral use of these affordances is Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL,
[2]), which is based on the socio-cultural ideas introduced by Vygotsky [3], stating
that knowledge is socially constructed.
This paper presents a series of CSCL experiments that took place at the
“Politehnica” University of Bucharest in a course on Human-Computer Interaction
(HCI) for the Computer Science and Engineering students. For 4 years in a row
(2005-2008), several assignments were given to students in order to establish a me-
dium sized knowledge building community using Social Web instruments. In the first
two years students had up to three assignments to be performed in small groups using
instant messenger (chat) conferencing [4]. In the last two years, the range of experi-
ments was extended to blogs and social networking. In addition, the students used
discussion forums for interactions with their peers and their tutors.
In the next section, the paper introduces the CSCL concepts that constitute the
theoretical basis for the experiment, plus the learning scenario. Then the key findings
and results are presented. Finally, we present our conclusions and plans for further
development.

Using the Social Web to Supplement Classical Learning 387
2 The Learning Scenario
The HCI course where the experiments were performed is available for students in
their senior year of undergraduate studies. Numerous students enroll for this course,
in fact there were 160 students in the 2007-2008 academic year and 324 students in
the 2008-2009 one. During the course, students were taught the theory of interface
design and evaluation and they had to apply their theoretical knowledge to practice by
individually developing several Web 2.0 applications for the laboratory.
In order to improve the learning process by using CSCL, we designed the follow-
ing scenario based on CSCL ideas [2]: The students were divided in groups of four.
They were asked to construct a web site for their team using the technologies and the
theoretical principles learnt in the course. They were also asked to use a blog to share
their personal experiences with the technology and to discuss about the new and inter-
esting materials they discovered during this course. Eventually, the students were also
required to use chat for debates on several themes specified by the teacher. One of the
main ideas of our new learning scenario was that students can understand better how
to design and implement Web 2.0 interaction techniques if they are also intensively
using them for group knowledge building.
For the social building of knowledge in small groups using instant messenger chat
conferencing, students had a number of assignments ranging from 1 to 3. For each
one, they were supposed to individually study collaborative technologies and, after-
wards, to debate in chat sessions in groups ranging from 3 to 8. In the first part of the
conversation, each student had to champion one of these technologies by presenting
its features and advantages and criticize the others by invoking their flaws and draw-
backs. In the final part of the chat, they had to discuss on how they could integrate all
these technologies in a single online collaboration platform. Therefore, in a single
conversation the students first engaged into a debate whose results are then used for
collaboratively building a solution to a given problem. The ConcertChat environment
[5] was used due to its features, such as the use of explicit references and of a white-
board and because it saved the chat consistently conversations on the server. These
chat logs can be viewed and replayed, and they were then used by the tutors to evalu-
ate the results of the chat conversations.
3 Results
We consider that the most important result from these experiments is the actual col-
laborative knowledge constructed by these groups of students. The resulted content
and the connections that were created between students are very valuable for many
reasons – documenting new technologies and less known problems among them, as
well as creating bonds between students and pinning down actual knowledge.
We analyzed the types of content created in order to establish their actual value for
the community and we also tried to evaluate which was the actual educational gain for
the individual student from this exercise.
We had 45 blogging teams in 2007-2008 and 96 in 2008-2009. These teams pro-
duced over 700 posts in the first year and 2200 in the second one. This content was

388 S. Trausan-Matu et al.
Table 1. Distribution of posts according to their categories
Percentage of posts
in each category
Personal
Experiences
New Technologies Studied
Technologies
2008 (%) 23 43 34
2009 (%) 14 21 61

not always of top quality and it was not always useful therefore we needed to define
some criteria for interesting and useful posts and blogs.
We have classified the posts in 4 categories – personal experiences (bug solving,
experience with a new API or with creating a small feature), technologies studied
(descriptions or personal views on technologies studied during the course or in the
lab), new technologies (also descriptions and/or views of new technologies usually
based on documentation more than on personal experience), and miscellaneous (pro-
ject’s journal, news, social, fun, and other articles meant to attract visitors and de-
velop some social interaction). The distribution of posts is presented in the following
table and discussed further in this section.
We considered that the most useful were the ones that presented personal experi-
ences because they are much more valuable from the point of view of the community
and of the user. Another important category was the one of new technologies. These
articles presented ideas or technologies that were connected to the contents of the
course or of the lab but there was not enough time to study them. Such examples are
Microsoft’s Silverlight (http://silverlight.net) for implementing interfaces, FOAF
(http://www.foaf-project.org/) for semantically describing networks of people, etc..
Furthermore, two systems were designed for chat analysis and they were used for
supporting the tutors in the evaluation process during the 2008-2009 academic year.
Preliminary results on a limited set of chat conversations will be presented at the
CSCL 2009 conference [6]. The tutors used the data that the tools provided in order to
have a better understanding of a chat conference in less time. For example, the im-
plicit references, the threads and the list of important topics were used for enhancing
the content-based analysis. The same may be argued in the case of the grades given
by the Polyphony Analyzer system [4, 6] for each utterance in the chat based on their
content and on speech act factors such as approval and disapproval. In addition, the
total score of all the utterances issued by a participant is used to provide an automatic
grading. By using these statistics as well as the visualization from Polyphony, the
tutor can better evaluate the degree of involvement of each student in the chat. The
preliminary tests were conducted on a group of 4 chat sessions involving teams of 4
members each that were analyzed separately by four tutors – two of them using the
tools and the other two without any software assistance. The grading error for Po-
lyphony is 10.1%, twice better than the second system, ASAP [7], and quite close to
the error rates of the tutors. Nevertheless, the correlations between the average tutor
grade and the grades provided by each of the two systems are significantly poorer
compared to those of the tutors. Still, the correlation obtained by Polyphony is en-
couraging for a subset of three chats out of the four - .85, only slightly worse than the
average tutor correlation. The improvement in time needed for the evaluation of a

Using the Social Web to Supplement Classical Learning 389
chat session is also hopeful as the time required for analysis was reduced by more
than 30% for the tutors employing the analysis tools.
4 Conclusions
The work presented in this paper describes a complex learning experiment, involving
collaborative software such as blogs and chats. The experiment has been used for
several years and more than 700 students participated in it over this period of time.
These students had the opportunity to learn interesting new facts by becoming inte-
grated in a learning community and by creating knowledge artifacts for this commu-
nity. The knowledge artifacts were used by the students in the same year and also, as
some of the statistical results show, they had an influence over the students that fol-
lowed the course in the next academic year.
The results show that this method of learning was appreciated by the students who
worked hard and produced an important quantity of valuable content. Also, students’
involvement in chat assignments was beyond our expectations. We suggested that a
typical chat session would have last for about one hour; however, more often than not
this duration was exceeded. Moreover, the students inter-animated in a high degree,
examples of different such patterns being discussed in [4].
Finally we consider that this paper proves that we can use social software to sup-
plement classical learning with good learning results and to provide a pleasant learn-
ing experience for the students.

Acknowledgments. Some of the work presented in this paper was financed through
the FP7 Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning project (LTfLL - http://ltfll-
project.org) and the K-Teams National CNCSIS project.
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