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Analyzing Social Construction Of Knowledge Online By Employing Interaction Analysis, Learning Analytics, And Social Network Analysis, Charlotte Nirmalani Gunawardena, Nick V. Flor, David Gomez, Damien Sanchez

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

This article examines research methods for analyzing social construction of knowledge in online discussion forums. We begin with an examination of the Interaction Analysis Model (Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson, 1997) and its applicability to analyzing social construction of knowledge. Next, employing a dataset from an online discussion, we demonstrate how interaction analysis can be supplemented by employing other research techniques such as learning analytics and Social Network Analysis that shed light on the social dynamics that support knowledge construction. Learning analytics is the application of quantitative techniques for analyzing large volumes of distributed data ("big data") in order to discover …