Yesterday our student Zinayida Petrushyna did a proposal talk about her upcoming software systems engineering master thesis “Network Modelling and Structural-Semantic Analysis of E-learning Communities” she is preparing at the chair of information systems at RWTH Aachen University. This thesis is supported by the Network of Excellence PROLEARN for Professional Training, the collaborative research center “Media and cultural communication” and the excellence research cluster UMIC.
The idea is that self-analysis and and self-modelling helps learning communities to understand their joint enterprise (JE), their mutual engagement (ME) and their shared repertoire (SR) better. Following the theories of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön learning takes place when their is a gap between the perceived performance and the desired performance. We call this gap a disturbance and disturbances contribute positively, neutral or negatively to the performance of a group. Self-analysis includes social network analysis, linguistic analysis and sentiment analysis which are giving in different combination insights on JE, ME and SR of communities of practice. Based on actor-network theory modelling the analysis system is proposing model fragments for media specific learning processes which can be used by the communities to evolve their models within the community. Models may be agent-oriented or goal-oriented and related to available resources in the community. Based on the model the analysis environment can extend or refine analysis of the desired performance of the group again.
