Bodong Chen and PhD student Basel Hussein recently presented a study in a workshop at the 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. Their paper, titled “Modelling Network Dynamics in Social Annotation,” examines complex network dynamics in collaborative web annotation in an online classroom. Departing from a conceptual exploration of social interaction in web annotation as a mediated process, as well as a dissatisfaction with analytical methods applied to web annotation data, they analyzed student interaction data from a web annotation environment following the Relational Event Modelling approach. Results found several network factors including student activity, reciprocity, annotation popularity, and annotation location playing important roles, while longer annotations were also slightly more likely to attract replies. This study contributes empirical insights into web annotation and calls for future work to investigate mediated social interaction as a dynamic network phenomenon.
View the presentation slides here.