Mihai Dascalu

ABSTRACT Starting from the socio-constructivist concepts of (virtual) community of practice (vCoP) and internet-based argumentative open-ended learning environments, this study proposes and validates two tools for automated dialogue assessment, ReaderBench and Important Moments, developed on the ground of the polyphonic social knowledge building model. The analyzed corpus was the dialogue produced by an academic vCoP with N = 179 community members in 23 months, and consisting of 3685 interventions in 292 text-based discussion threads. The analysis results uncovered significant differences in the discussion threads produced by central and peripheral participants, such that central participants produced more interventions with higher collaborative dialogue quality, and the discussion threads they initiated were longer and involved a larger number of participants. Moreover, based on the automated analysis result, the vCoP participants could be classified in two clusters corresponding to the well-known core-periphery structure of CoPs. These findings are consistent with those revealed by other methods, and suggest that the employed tools are appropriate for identifying virtual communities that are appropriate as open-ended learning environments. Further research and development is needed to deepen quantitative vCoP models and test communication strategies recommended to students in vCoP-based argumentative open-ended learning environments.

Understanding a text in order to learn is subject to modeling and is partly dependent to the complexity of the read text. We transpose the evaluation process of textual complexity into measurable factors, identify linearly independent variables and combine multiple perspectives to obtain a holistic approach, addressing lexical, syntactic and semantic levels of textual analysis. Also, the proposed evaluation model combines statistical factors and traditional readability metrics with information theory, specific information retrieval ...

Chat-like conversations are very popular and are often used by members of communities of practice to share ideas, propose solutions and to solve problems. With the advent and increasing popularity of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), chat conversations have also started to be used in a formal educational setting. However, the main problem when tutors tried to assess their students' chat conversations is that this process is very difficult and time consuming. Therefore, several efforts have been ...

Page 1. A. Ramsay and G. Agre (Eds.): AIMSA 2012, LNAI 7557, pp. 59–68, 2012. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Analyzing Emotional States Induced by News Articles with Latent Semantic Analysis Diana Lupan1, Mihai Dascălu1,2, ,Stefan ...