Alyssa Friend Wise
Monologues or Dialogue?: Examining Group and Individual Trajectories in Online Discussions over Time
2nd June 2014, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Salle F502, Télécom ParisTech - 46 rue Barrault Paris 13 - Metro Corvisart
(how to get there ?)
Abstract
The power of the internet to bring people in different locations together in virtual conversation is often claimed to have great potential benefits for learning. Yet frequently such discussions are incoherent, with comments not following any clear flow and participants seemingly interested more in explaining their own views than paying attention to the ideas of others. How can we better understand the reasons for the curious paths groups' online conversations take? How can we recognize the ways individuals choose to participate in and change them? This talk will describe several recent research efforts analyzing how individuals "speak" and "listen" in online discussions, the relationships between these two processes, and the lines of mutual influence between individual and group trajectories through a discussion space.
Biography
Alyssa Friend Wise is an Associate Professor with the Educational Technology & Learning Design Program at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her research examines how people interact with each other through technologies and how such interactions can contribute to learning. Recent work includes the E-Listening Project (research into how participants attends to others' comments in online discussions), the development of Youtopia (a collaborative table-top game about sustainability issues), and the creation of a model for Learning Analytics Interventions (a pedagogical approach to help students work with data collected on their learning as part of the educational process).