Representación gráfica de los hilos de discusión en línea, de un curso académico en un contexto constructivista

Abstract

Constructivist teaching in virtual environments places particular emphasis on the use of discussion forums. This article presents the implementation of a concept of constructivist didactics through an e-learning course on the Blackboard platform of the Department of Education at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Students were motivated to build knowledge through their participation in discussion forums on the Blackboard platform. Teachers, in their role of moderators, expected to be able to gradually reduce their presence in the debates. The challenge was to be able to measure the extent to which this was achieved, considering that thousands of discussion contributions had to be analyzed. This document describes how the discussion lines can be extracted from Blackboard to be used by UCINET software for social network and thus produce a graphic presentation of the discussion sequences.

Constructivist teaching in virtual environments places particular emphasis on the use of discussion forums. This article presents the implementation of a concept of constructivist didactics through an e-learning course on the Blackboard platform of the Department of Education at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Students were motivated to build knowledge through their participation in discussion forums on the Blackboard platform. Teachers, in their role of moderators, expected to be able to gradually reduce their presence in the debates. The challenge was to be able to measure the extent to which this was achieved, considering that thousands of discussion contributions had to be analyzed. This document describes how the discussion lines can be extracted from Blackboard to be used by UCINET software for social network and thus produce a graphic presentation of the discussion sequences.