Centerness is defined as a quality of multi-agent systems (groups) where agents share a common set of system goals and interact so the system will achieve those goals. A pair of measures is identified to capture the two dimensions of centerness: distance-weighted fragmentation and average goal centerness. As a case study, the measures of…

With the increasing prominence of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in higher education, the number of programmes and studies integrating online peer interaction opportunities on social media, likewise, has surged. Nevertheless, little quantitative research has been performed on the ways in which learners interact with one another via these…

Networking plays an important role in research projects to build a community and audience around a research area. Using social media is popular in project communication as it provides the ability to engage with a group of followers daily. Such online networking tools provide the advantage of providing nearrealtime data, which can be used to…

Teacher professional development (PD) that supports the emergence of professional learning communities (PLCs) is effective for teachers' learning and instructional improvement. Our work focuses on supporting the emergence of online PLCs and an emergent issue in this work is how to maintain the quality of teachers' experiences in online PLCs when…

Interactive problem solving environments, such as intelligent tutoring systems and educational video games, produce large amounts of transactional data which make it a challenge for both researchers and educators to understand how students work within the environment. Researchers have modeled the student-tutor interactions using complex network…

This article presents an analysis showing how collegial interactions can augment the mechanism of teachers' learning from professional development. The analysis relies on social network data and self-reports of writing instructional practices from teachers in 20 different schools that were part of a longitudinal study of the National Writing…

History has shown the importance of interaction in the online teaching/learning environment. The World Wide Web has allowed interaction to expand the cognitive process by facilitating the construction of personal knowledge. The web, however, has been both a challenge and an opportunity to interaction. This paper draws on the literature to…

Blogs provide contextualization of the information which is vital to the process of peer support. Through dialogues initiated by blog authors and followed by readers, blog platforms build a viable base of shared experiences and mutual relationships. We employ blogs as interactive learning tools for communities of practice in higher education.…

This study aims to investigate the patterns and the quality of online interaction during project-based learning (PjBL) on both micro and macro levels. To achieve this purpose, PjBL was implemented with online group activities in an undergraduate course. Social network analysis (SNA) and content analysis were employed to analyze online interaction…

Analysis of interaction patterns is one of the most important indicators of quality of learning in educational web forums. Social network analysis (SNA) is gradually assuming importance in the study of interaction patterns as it focuses on the analysis of the interrelationships between individuals, thus providing a holistic perspective on group…

This paper analyses the use of various communication channels in science teachers' professional development project aiming to develop versatile uses for ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in science teaching. A teacher network was created specifically for this project, and the researchers facilitated three forms of communication…

A study was conducted of the use of a computer teleconferencing system developed by Participation Systems Inc. (nicknamed PARTI) as enhancement for two independent study credit courses in the behavioral sciences, Introduction to Effective Communication and Introductory Psychology. An earlier study in the spring and summer of 1983 had tested the…

Computer-mediated conferencing has been adopted, particularly for purposes of online course provision, as a method that can deliver community. Widespread interest in a communities-of-practice approach within both informal and formal learning has strengthened perceptions of the value of creating a community online. A case study of asynchronous…

This article reviews research related to the construct of interaction in the educational technology and distance education literature. The review is limited to higher education and includes theories and empirical research that inform the construct of online interactions. Conceptual and operational definitions of "interaction" are categorized from…