Cooperative learning assisted by automatic classification within social networking services

Abstract

Social networking services tend to promote social relations among people sharing interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. They consist of a representation of each user, namely a profle, along with of his/her social links and a variety of additional information. Such kind of information can be used as a means for highlighting the educational aspect of social networking services. To this direction, the authors of this chapter used Facebook as a testbed for this research and implemented a multi-language learning application. The main focus of this chapter is on the automatic classifcation of Facebook users, utilizing the aforementioned application, based on their profles. In that way, coherent user clusters can be created and effcient cooperative learning among them can be achieved. Finally, the educational process can be further ameliorated given that cooperation among user clusters is recommended by the system.