The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) is a software tool from University of Wollongong which shows who talks to who in a student discussion forum. I tried it with the Moodle forums in my Green ICT course and, not surprisingly, it showed myself at the center of the network. The tool also works with BlackBoard /WebCT and operates via a Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer web browser.
As it is the tool is interesting, but perhaps a little too sophisticated for the average teacher. I would prefer something which would give me a tabular summary, rather than an interactive 3D graphic. A simple table could tell you which are the students not engaging in discussion, the key information brokers, provide some learning community metrics, and some input for marking.
Also the security issues with the software are not clear. Is the data from the password protected course web site being transmitted to University of Wollongong, or is the processing being done locally on my computer?
1 comment:
I wrote 5 July 2011, 03:10 PM:
>The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) is a software tool from University of Wollongong which shows who talks to who in a student discussion forum ...
I got quite a few replies from people interested in such tools. Phillip Long from UQ, explained the tool runs on the user's browser and so does not send confidential data to a remote server:
-------- Original Message --------
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 18:39:01 +1000 ...
Hi Tom: Good to see you've found SNAPP of some value and interest.
Shane's work (now being done at UBC) on SNAPP drove the development of the tool...
The presentation of the visual connections seemed more intuitive to us as a sociogram rather than the tabular listing of 'distances' between individuals. Of course,
you can get that list by exporting the data in several formats (comma delimited for Excel, GraphML, or VNA (NetDraw).
The tool is effectively screen scraping the structure of the discussion thread for each compatible LMS platform (Bb, Moodle, WebCT). As such, if you have permission to see the discussion thread, then you can invoke
the javascript plug-in on your browser toolbar to create the graphic representations of the message exchange patterns in the thread. Nothing is being drawn from the course LMS installed software environment.
Regards,
phil
Phillip Long, Prof. & Director
http://ceit.uq.edu.au
Post a Comment