DIGITAL LIBRARY
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING WORK. EVALUATION MODEL USING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODOLOGY OF “ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS”
Universidad Nacional de La Plata (ARGENTINA)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN15 Proceedings
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 5373-5380
ISBN: 978-84-606-8243-1
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 6-8 July, 2015
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
Collaborative work is one of the areas of greatest development and research in this time of consolidation of teaching with digital technology. Among other factors, for the traceability of collaborative construction processes enabling technology, teachers can observe, analyze, hypothesize about how students learn, and then intervene with more and better information.

This possibility, that technology offers, brings important questions: How do you track these collaborative processes? What components are included in the development of collaboration? What stages are involved? How important is the subjective and individual performance and how these opinions are weighed in the framework of collaborative construction? What is the role of the technology in this process? What do the mediators do?

This article presents a methodology for evaluating collaborative work applied in an experience with adult learners, all of them teachers and students of a graduate course.

The experience is a learning activity with three stages:
1. presentation of the context and the learning tasks, through a video they see all participants simultaneously,
2. reception of information individually and privately and
3. collaborative work to solve the problem using some of the data collected in the previous stage.

The objective of the methodology of evaluation focuses on the cognitive abilities of the individual and the group negotiation at the resolution stage (step 3). The methodology used corresponds to “Analysis of Social Networks”. This methodology allows us to discover patterns of social interaction centered in the collaborative construction. We consider technology as a member, with special features.

In this paper we discuss the methodology of evaluation of individual stages and group collaborative construction. We arrive at some preliminary results, in terms of how the collaborative construction works and which is its relationship with the previous stages.