Interaction based on contribution awareness in collaborative learning

Abstract

In the collaborative learning, each participant progresses their discussion by observing his/her contribution to other participants. By grasping these contributive atmosphere through networks, participants will be promoted to discuss more actively. As contribution information in the discussion, there are two types of contributions. Short-term contribution corresponds to the immediate contribution for other participants. Long-term contribution indicates the contribution of each participant through the whole discussion. In this paper, we propose a visualization method of contribution in the collaborative learning environment. For short-term contribution, the reference action to the useful utterance is represented by moving lighting balls from the utterer locations to the referrers. In addition, referred utterances are appeared in the visualization window as long-term contribution. Experimental result showed that our method could appropriately give the awareness for thinking/making useful utterances. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.