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Facilitate the Facilitator: Awareness Tools to Support the Moderator to Facilitate Online Discussions for Networked Learning Maarten de Laat, Mike Chamrada & Rupert Wegerif AbstractThis paper is part of an ongoing European research project, called ARGUNAUT.
We would like to present some of our findings regarding the development
of online awareness tools supporting the moderator to best facilitate
online discussions. The ARGUNAUT system is based on synchronous learning
and embeds an integrated suite of tools in order to set up and moderate
synchronous discussions. Our focus in this paper is on the Moderators
Interface (MI), which is a tool especially designed for the moderator.
This tool allows moderators to log on to one or more ongoing discussions
and provides the moderator a set of awareness indicators to be used to
remotely facilitate these discussions. In this paper we firstly discuss our theoretical orientation towards
online argumentation and dialogues. This results in a multidimensional
analytical framework to analyse synchronous discussions in order to develop
awareness tools for the MI. Secondly an overview of the ARGUNAUT system
is presented focussing on the use of awareness indicators by moderators
to facilitate their facilitation of online discussions. Using the MI the
moderator can select a visualisation of the actual discussion graph as
it is created by the students, in order to read their contributions. Furthermore
the moderator can request various descriptive statistical information
about the number and type of contributions made by students. More advanced
visualisations for example show live interaction patterns of the participants
using social network analysis (SNA) techniques and the Deep Loop classification
of contributions written by the students. The Deep Loop, is an AI-based
awareness indicator that can automatically detect for example if students
are talking of / on-task, critical reasoning and question-answer patterns.
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