I’m heading off to Adelaide to present at the Blackboard Asia Pacific 08 conference. I’ll be presenting on work done in collaboration with Dr Shane Dawson on extracting and analyzing data from discussion forums in Blackboard Learning Systems. We had a few unique conditions: we could not install anything on the server (no server side Building Blocks or Powerlinks) and the solution had to work for both Blackboard and Vista (ie WebCT). ….So we embraced ‘constraint’ and built a GreaseMonkey script that was able to extract the relevant post-reply data from the forum thread tree. The GreaseMonkey script also exported the data into the VNA and GraphML formats, so that a free/open source social network visualisation tool could be used.

To illustrate the important of visualisation, we compare two forums. The forum threads look similar: the same number of participants and same number of posts. Visualising the structure of the forums, however produces completely different pictures of the social interaction.

Note: NetDraw was used to generate the visualisation.