Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Nicolò Antonio Piave -
Number of replies: 15
Hi!

I am searching for someone who is able to create a plugin for moodle, which can build a SNA matrix in order to generate a SNA graph, taking data from moodle tables.

If there is yet a software like that, please help me. Alternatively, I accept candidacies.

Nicolò (npiave@gmail.com)


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In reply to Nicolò Antonio Piave

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Valery Fremaux -
Hi Nicolò,

this might be a so interesting project. I just have finished reading a complete EU Research Report on the subject. I tick you on your email...

cheers.
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In reply to Valery Fremaux

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Alexandre Lima -
Hello,

I'm very interested in this subject. Could we exchange some ideas?

Cheers.
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In reply to Nicolò Antonio Piave

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Justin Student -
I am very interested in the plugin also. I do know of one but I have not tested it yet or even tried to install it. http://www.randomsyntax.com/blackboard-forum-social-network-analysis/

Please let me know of any documents, research, PDFs etc. that you have on the topic.

I am preparing a research project and may use Moodle as my environment with SNA sociograms as a way to inform pedagogy.
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In reply to Nicolò Antonio Piave

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
I'd love to have a plugin like that as well. My master's project could also use such a tool. Your idea seems much simpler, because I was thinking of having a graphing program do the visualization on the web and on the fly.

Too bad I'm no programmer, because it seems that all is needed is to pick up ids entries rather than content analyze the actual entries and put them in a separate table as ordered pairs or something.
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In reply to Nicolò Antonio Piave

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
I tested the http://www.randomsyntax.com/blackboard-forum-social-network-analysis/ approach for forums on this discussion. No installation is needed, I just bookmarked the link below as it states:

Bookmarklet/Favlet Installation For Moodle

  1. Drag the SNA Analysis link to the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. In Internet Explorer, right click on the link below and click Add to Favorites.
    Moodle SNA Analysis
  2. Visit a Forum in Moodle. Ensure that “Display replies in nested form” is selected.
  3. Click on the Moodle SNA Analysis bookmark (from the Bookmarks menu in Firefox or the Favorites menu in IE). The SNA Analysis data will be inserted below the forum. You may need to enable the Menu bar in IE 7, to view the Favorites menu. In Firefox the page will automatically scroll to the location of the SNA Analysis data. In IE you will need to scroll to the bottom of the Forum yourself - the SNA Analysis data is inserted below the forum.
  4. The SNA Analysis will contain the number of posts, relationships and sna export data in GraphML and for the NetDraw Application (ie a .vna file).
  5. You will need to save the generated txt to a .vna file. You can open and plot the graph in NetDraw. Inline graph plotting will be coming soon.
Here is the output which appeared at the end of the forum:

output

And the graph drawn with NetDraw (Wow, it's from Steve Borgatti kool)

graph


I just don't know how it would scale with very large networks.

Attached are the relevant files.

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In reply to Roel Cantada

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Stuart Mealor -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Hmmm, I'm missing something here...?

I dragged the "Moodle SNA Analysis" link to the Firefox toolbar.
Using Firefox 3.0.11 on Apple Mac.

Doing this just creates a link to the randomsyntax.com website (as expected).
Clicking on it does not create an analysis of the Forum I am looking at.

Roel, when you say "No installation is needed" is this correct?

Anyone else having problems with this... or do I just need to sleep, rest, and try again later? lol wink Stu
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In reply to Stuart Mealor

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
Hi Stuart,

I did what you did except I'm running firefox in a WinXP machine, and if you are not in a forum like this it should say in a dialogue box:

The SNA Analysis tool is either unable to determine the LMS you are using or you are trying to analyse a page that does not contain a forum. This version of the SNA Analysis tool only works with Moodle.

The link you have posted does not display the proper javascript information that is in the original page. I tried your link and only got a javascript output, but when I dragged the original link in http://www.randomsyntax.com/blackboard-forum-social-network-analysis/ it worked.

When I hover over my mouse over the link you posted, the status bar of my firefox browser says

http://www.randomsyntax.com/snabookmarklet/moodle/sna_bookmarklet.js?uniqueCache=%27+%28new%20Date%28%29%29.getTime%28%29;z.type=%27text/javascript%27;void%28document.body.appendChild%28z%29%29;

while the original should say "

javascript:z=document.createElement('script');z.src='http://www.randomsyntax.com/snabookmarklet/moodle/sna_bookmarklet.js?uniqueCache='+(new%20Date()).getTime();z.type='text/javascript';void(document.body.appendChild(z));

Try dragging this link to your bookmark, or the one in the original page:

original Moodle SNA Analysis

Roel
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In reply to Roel Cantada

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
Never mind what I said about the link, it appears moodle filtered the javascript, because even the link that I created got filtered. I forgot that it does that.namula

Oh no!nagulat you didn't try to drag the link I first posted in this forum did you?

Just use the one in the original page at http://www.randomsyntax.com/blackboard-forum-social-network-analysis/.

If that does not work. Is it possible that you have some javascript settings in your browser turned off? Or you have some extension, messing with your browser's javascript interpretation.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Roel Cantada

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Stuart Mealor -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Hello Roel

Thanks for helping me with this - ...and yes(!) I did drag the link in the first forum post (which as I think back was probably never going to work! lol)

So, now I can see the statistics table smile

Thanks so much !

Stuart smile
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In reply to Stuart Mealor

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
You are welcome Stuart. Glad to be of help.

I have another idea for data mining the forums without overloading the servers. How about an RSS feed-Agrregator setup.

If we could modify the RSS feed of forums (which already exist) to send metadata of the social network to a client aggregator that can combine and convert this metadata into usable file formats for SNA.

This would have the added advantage of the forums being able to opt out of an analysis by simply turning off their RSS feed (a way to mitigate the Big Brother syndrome). Aside from that, we could anonymize the data before sending it out.

This automated approach would also allow three people to do separate data mining and then verify the reliability of each other's dataset. Of course if this is than accross the globe, the aggregator should synchronize to UTC time for a cut-off. I think, once the datasets are available we could simply diff them for verification of accuracy.

There would be a need to agree on the metadata format for the RSS though. And I think the RSS should keep an index table of user id x code, so the aggregator can combine the right node ties.

What do you think, would this be feasible?

Roel
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In reply to Roel Cantada

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Stuart Mealor -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Hi Roel

I'm not a Moodle core developer unfortunately so I can't tell you how feasible this idea is sad

However, you could add it to the Tracker as a new feature request ?

Of course, the roadmap is very busy towards Moodle 2.0, so if you can find ways to achieve similar results without needing core development that might be easier / quicker smile

Stu
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In reply to Stuart Mealor

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
When I looked at their script, it appears that they are using three javascript scripts.

  1. sna_bookmarklet.js the main one
  2. sna_analysis.js
  3. jquery-1.2.6.js from jquery.com

Jquery is dual license under MIT and GPL, but the others have no license information. But its pretty transparent from the links that were filtered by moodle.
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In reply to Roel Cantada

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
imho, the weaknesses of this javascript tool is that it cannot analyze multiple pages of a discussion thread. The messages should be displayed in one page (e.g. 200 messages).

Second is that it get it gets tedious when the forum allows the students to start their own thread. I had to open hundreds of thread to analyze, and then combine the data for one forum.

Finally, I have to cut and paste the data in a text editor, rather than being to just save it somewhere directly.

We could use a plugin that shows one big button that will allow us to analyze all forums, all threads in one forum, or one thread only.
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In reply to Nicolò Antonio Piave

Re: Creating a new plugin for social network analysis on moodle's forum - SOS

by Roel Cantada -
My wishlist for such a plugin goes beyond SNA. I could also use the following:

  1. Semantic analysis of the messages themselves, that will allow me to map clusters of concepts directly linked to the posts, and the actors. So I can get an idea of what the actors are thinking.
  2. Link crawler and analyzer for links posted in the messages, to show the open corpus that is part of the discussion. And even possibly map the blogs and respected comments shown in a remote feedback block. Thereby I can get a comprehensive picture of the learning environment that goes beyond Moodle. (Can SocSciBot do this?)
  3. SNA of the activity logs, to show vicarious learning behavior, or followers of particular threads. We can't see the lurkers in the SNA of posts only.
  4. Time generated networks based on the time of posting and lurking. So I can animate the network and see how the relations unfold.

Such a tool along with SNA will not only be great for research, but also for diagnosis of collaborative learning (e.g. identify isolates). It can also be used to evaluate the design of the course.

I hope I could have something like that to be able to study online distance learning in four dimensions (concepts, learning environment, actors, time) as discussed in my proposed model of distance learning.

Unfortunately most solutions I have seen are based on Java, and I don't know Java. Anybody know PHP based GPL'ed coded tools for such purposes?

TIA,

Roel
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