Friday, September 12, 2008

ECER 2008 - Evaluating Interactional Processes of leaners with Hypertextual online

Live blog from a session at ECER 2008.

Presented by Stefan Iske from Technische Universität Darmstadt and Norbert Meder from Universität Duisburg-Essen.

It's about trails and paths. About orientation.

The researchers were interested in the digital divide and digital inequaity but also about non-linear structures for learning (i.e. hypertextual).

Log files of page accesses can give loads of information. The data can be aggregated to give information about how many people visited, average time spent on a page etc. However, temporal data that describes a users path through the data. You can then look to see if there are similarities and how the pathways are grouped using Interaction Analysis. The researcher used Optimal-Matching techniques and Levenshtein Distance to group pathways acording to similarity.

[Interesting aproach to analysing what was happening but there was not enough in the presentation fr me to work out why you would do it. The researcher suggested it coud reveal different learning startegies. I supose this means you coud stucture materal more effectively to meet the needs of different learners. - DM]

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