Knowledge Forum 4.6 Applets

Thanks to Chew Lee for encouraging me to try the third-party applets to analyze thesis data in my Knowledge Forum 4.6 databases. The applet list icon appears unobtrusively in the left-hand toolbar,

and when you click on it, five tools are displayed:

Contribution shows descriptive statistical data that I previously used ATK for: notes contributed, percentage read, views worked in, etc. What I liked about the new version was that it displayed the data in a graph rather than in a tabular form, though you could put the cursor over items to see the numbers.

These tools work best using Safari, but there are some glitches regardless of browser, for example

I also tried the vocabulary growth tool, which traces individual students’ vocabulary development over time (note: course was 4 months long whereas this example is graphed over 8 months),

and the semantic overlap tool over weeks 3 and 10 in an online course, which might indicate progressive work on a concept over time:

I need to understand how the SocialNetwork applet works because I don’t know enough about Social Network Analysis yet to figure out what parameters I should be setting!

Since I’ve been exploring the change in individual students and changes in students’ understandings of specific concepts over time using qualitative content analysis, these tools provide alternate ways to look at some of my findings!!