Social Network Analysis to Blog-based Online Communities

1. Introduction
Blog create a context for dialogues between bloggers and readers.Most blog platforms provide a personal writing space that is easy to publish, sharable.Blogs can combine solitary and social interaction in the learning processes .Considerable research has been carried out on the educational use of blogs (Richardson, 2006;Williams and Jacobs, 2004; Oravec, 2002;Dailey 2006).

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used as a research vehicle to investigate the structural patterns of blogging communities.SNA is a sociological methodology for analyzing patterns of relationships and interactions between social actors in order to discover the underlying social structure .

2.Blogs as Learning

Social Learning

The intrinsic structure of blogs enables social learning.Blogs is a form of Social Media.Blogs have the potentials to upgrade personal learning to social learning.
Social construction of knowledge through social media such blogs help explain why assessing other’s work may be conducive to social learning.In this sense, blogs have the potentials to upgrade personal learning to social learning. For the purpose of promoting critical and analytical thinking, after a student has read another’s posting, she is asked to leave comment to that posting. We call it the creation of “dialogue links” that are different from the trackback links (Figure 1).

The “comments on comments” may even sometimes create a long sequence of dialogues in terms of discussions or debates involved by more and more people as the dialogues proceed. Fortunately, these dialogues can be tracked by RSS easily, thanks to the feature that many blog platforms added recently to make possible the tracking of comments in addition to the posting.

Figure 1. The formation of social learning circles by creating not just trackback links but also dialogue links in blogs.

3.Social Media Experiments

Sample : There are 36 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory computer science course at a university in a metropolitan area.

Platform : The Blog in our study is based on the platform of Blogger at http://www.blogger.com/ which is now a property of Google.

Procedure: First of all, student took a tour to a local science fair.A short essay was written by each student .After the essay was finished, each student was asked to browse their peers’ work and make at least 3 comments on others’ essays(Figure 2) .Conducting social network analysis to investigate the student behaviors in terms of social learning.

Figure 2. participant i left a comment on participant j by Social network analysis.

Results

We investigated the blogs of N=36 participanting students and chased the links of comments one by one. Table 1 summarizes the statistics of the comments found in the study. A distribution of number of comments is shown in Figure 3.

Table 1 : Metrics of Social Learning

Figure 3: Distribution of numbers of comments versus counts.

To calculate the tranitive closure and the distance between ordered pairs of participants in terms of hops where the hop count Cij is the number of clicks required to traverse from Participant i to Participant j. The distribution of numbers of hops is shown in Figure4.

Figure4:The distribution of numbers of hops versus counts.

Limitations
The results reported are limited as following reasons .

1. The sample size was small
2. The context of learning was narrowly define.
3. Blogging acted as a supplement to a traditional face-to-face course.
4. The social network analysis measures the online community of practice from a structure point of view.

Therefore, We conduct a survey study on a larger sample and collect data regarding non-structural issues .

4. User Survey
Sample Three undergraduate classes, namely Electronic Commerce, Java Programming Language and Programming for Internet Applications, with 23, 38 and 36 students respectively.
Divided into D-Group with 48 samples and S-Group with 23 samples.
Procedure
D group emphasizes the use of blog as an express lane of delivering finished work for the instructor to check out immediately.
S group sees the blogs as idea sharing platform, namely encourages students to read peer blogs and make comments. The questionnaire was poised by a score on a 5-point scale.
All the questionnaires are administrated anonymously by a third party without the instructor on the spot. The following five hypotheses are coded in the questionnaire and tested in the survey administrated to the two groups.
Hypothesis 1: Blogging helps students feel more connected and interactive with classmates.
Hypothesis 2: Blogging helps students more engaged and interested in the subjects covered by the courses .
Hypothesis 3: Blogging improved the quality and experience of learning .
Hypothesis 4: Students take a look at people’s homework first when they don’t have a clue to the problems.
Hypothesis 5: Students uphold the principle of honesty and make no duplicates of people’s homework, although students may read it at times.
4.1Summary of Survey
According to Table 2., the mean of Hypothesis 1 is greater then 3, and the other four hypotheses receive means with value greater then 4. The effects of blogging on learning are supported.
Table 2. Survey results regarding the tree classes.

Table 3 : t-test results of S-Group and D-Group

Further conduct the t-testto assess whether the means of the two groups are statistically different from each other. The results are summarized in Table 3.

Regarding Hypotheses 1, 2 and 3, blogs of the S-Group as tools for social construction help build more sense of community , and better improve experiences of learning than those in D-Group.
Except for Hypothesis 4, the means of two groups are statistically different . For Hypothesis 4, the difference in two groups is not significant. It indicates that no matter which of the two ways the blogs are used to support learning acitvities, both groups recognize the possibility of blogs as repository of clues to solve problems.
For Hypothesis 5, both groups show positive signs regarding the principle of honesty .It is worth of noting that the S group is more aware of the ethics issues than the other group.

Conclusions
Using blogs is found to simplify the tasks of reducing piracy.
Blogs are a viable platform for ideas to flat and grow.
Blags are easy to maintain, low cost, easy to deploy, and simple to get started.

Social Network Analysis to Blog-based Online Community

1. Introduction

Blogs have found their use in education. For example, blogs often serve as a digital portfolio of students’ assignments and achievements. Most blog platforms provide a personal writing space that is easy to publish, sharable, and automatically archived and empower users to form learning communities by way of inter-linkages. blogs can combine solitary and social interaction in the learning processes.

2. Methodology
First of all, the instructor creates a blog for the lab class at the outset(Figure1). Instructor blogs are they serve to deliver lab sheets and hand-outs in electronic version. Students are encouraged to read the instructor blog before class meets so that they can get themselves prepared.
When finishing a lab in class, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs immediately and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor's blog where the lab is made public. students can to check into their classmate’s blogs to see what other people have written.

Figure 1. Instructor blogs are for posting lab materials in the curriculum.

Student-Centric
The blogging approach works in an individual way: not only instructors but also students own blogs. The ownership holds no matter whether the class ends or not. The sense of ownership helps build incentives for students to contribute to and participate in the class while taking the course (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Each student posts lab results on her or his blog instead of the instructor blog.

Social Learning

To create deeper dialogues and further the opportunities of social learning, the students who receive comments from his classmates are asked to do two things next. For one thing, they are asked to say thanks, by leaving a comment below the received ones, to the people who have made the comments to their works. For the other, further comments about the subjects commented by their peers are asked in response. The “comments on comments” may even sometimes create a long sequence of dialogues in terms of discussions or debates involved by more and more people as the dialogues proceed (Figure 3). Fortunately, these dialogues can be tracked by RSS easily, thanks to the feature that many blog platforms added recently to make possible the tracking of comments in addition to the postings.

Figure 3. Students learn from peers by creating dialogues or “comments on comments” with each other.

Experiences of Adopting In-class Blogs in the Teaching of Hands-on

1.Methodology Blogs have found their use in education. It further concludes that blogging has the potential to be a transformational technology for teaching and learning.

1. First of all, the instructor creates a blog for the lab class at the outset. Every student of the class is required to create a blog for the lab when the semester begins.
2. Instructor blogs are they serve to deliver lab sheets and hand-outs in electronic version.
3. Students are encouraged to read the instructor blog before class meets so that they can get themselves prepared.
4. When finishing a lab in class, students are asked to submit their results at their own blogs immediately and make a notice by placing a link at the instructor's blog where the lab is made public.
5. students can to check into their classmate’s blogs to see what other people have written.

The blog is so responsive that instructors can make quick and informed judgments on which students to walk to and initiate further interactions with.

Dialogue-Based

Getting student feedback in a lab setting helps engage with students and creates a real dialogue.

Status Tracking

Blogs are a versatile administrative tool to track the status of the computer-based lab students conduct. Blog posts replace the paper sheets for students to turn in their lab works.

Figure 1. The formation of social learninig circles by creating not just trackback links but also dialogus links in blogs.

Social Learning
- The intrinsic structure of blogs enables social learning.
- Blogs is a form of Social Media ,Share opinions, experiences, viewpoints and Collaborative Learning .
-Blogs have the potentials to upgrade personal learning to social learning.
-Social construction of knowledge through social media such blogs help explain why assessing other’s work may be conducive to social learning.
-For the purpose of promoting critical and analytical thinking, after a student has read another’s posting, she is asked to leave comment to that posting. We call it the creation of “dialogue links” that are different from the trackback links.

2. Survey Results

Sample :
two undergraduate classes, namely Java Programming Language and Programming for Internet Applications, with 38 and 35 stduents respectively

Result :

48% respondents agree that the blog helps interactions among students enrolled in the same class , 18 % don’t agree and 34% have no opinions.

79% respondents agree that the use of in-class blogs helps keep the students interested and motivated in learning, while the remaining 21% have no opinions.

As to the impact of in-class blogging on learning effectiveness, 86% respondents think it is positive while 1% think it is negative and 13% have no opinions.

As to read classmates’ blogs when a take-home assignment problem is hard, 84% respondents answer positively while 3% answer no and the remaining 13% have no opinions.

Student uphold the principles of respecting intellectual property and refuse to duplicate, 79% responds positively while 6% confess they do duplicate at least some of others’ ideas that are posted on their classmates’ blogs and the remaining 15% have no opinions.

先進網際服務系統--Homework5_2008-03-29

1. Read the abstract of Paper 3, 6 and 7. If possible, skim the whole paper.
Summarize the papers briefly.
paper 3
paper 6
paper 7

2. According to Chap. 6 of Textbook. what is a functional architecture of e-commerce systems?
A2: the system architecture is the way it decomposes the system into functional units. The specification of these functional units and the interfaces between them defines the architecture of the system. For analysis of architecture, we have found it convenient to consider four primary components of Internet commerce systems.

1. Client : The client is a computer system, typically a personal computer, connected to the Internet either directly, through an Internet service provider (ISP), or indirectly, through a corporate network. The buyer uses the client computer for browsing and purchasing.
2. Merchant : The merchant is the computer system or systems that contain the seller’s electronic catalog and, in the case of online goods, products for over-the-Net fulfillment.
3. Transaction system : The transaction system is the computer system or systems that process a particular order and that are responsible for payment, record keeping, and other business aspects of the transaction.
4. Payment gateway : The payment gateway is the computer system that routes payment instructions into existing financial networks such as for credit card authorization and settlement.

Various architectures use these four components in different ways. In some systems, some of these components are combined into a single computer system, whereas in others these four system components are implemented by separate computer systems.

3. Lab: PageRank
PageRank is a tool for measuring the importance of websites. Given every URL, there is a PageRank value for it.
Install PageRank on your Firefox. Perform the measurements in terms of PageRank the following websites:

New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/

CNN http://www.cnn.com/