what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
software. he network itself had 4 forums and contained 9327 topics with 3214 par-
ticipants in total. he goal here was to determine what kind of network distribution
can be generated from participants who posted at least one message from a specific
topic. his will help us to understand the cluster formation in our social network.
Figure 16.6 is the graph of distribution of co-discussants in our experiment. Both
X- and Y-axis are logarithmic scales, and we realized that the power trendline was
the best it for these data.
It is clear from the graph that almost all the data converged to a straight line. It
can then be said that these data follow a power-law form distribution
p(k)
close to
1/
k
n
,
where
n
=
1.20
for the best it of the straight line.
In summary, this section explored and examined social networks structured
in online discussion forums. Among numerous key channels such as NetMeeting,
phone calls, e-mail, and others, online discussion was selected for the study
because it is easier to gather participants' information and messages without mak-
ing hardware and software changes. A platform of analyzing online discussion
forums was outlined, and some results were obtained. For instance, it is found
that the number of responses on a specific topic follows a power distribution,
while the number of views follows a lognormal distribution. Moreover, the study
proves that the number of co-discussants follows a power-law distribution. Even
though some interesting results have been found, more research needs to be done
for a complete understanding of CSCL networks. More importantly, software
needs to be developed for allowing efficient extraction of network attributes on a
large-scale network. Finally, it will also be beneficial to study forums in other Web
Distribution of Co-discussants
10000
1000
100
10
1
0.1
1
10
100
No. of Co-discussants
Figure16.6
Distributionofco-discussants.(FromYeung,Y.2005.Macroscopic
study of the social networks formed in web-based discussion forums. In
Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative
Learning: Learning 2005: The Next 10 Years!
(Taipei,Taiwan,May30-June04,
2005).ComputerSupportforCollaborativeLearning.InternationalSocietyofthe
LearningSciences,727-731.)
