ANALYSIS OF THE ALTRUISTIC DIMENSION OF CSCL CHATS
ANALYSIS OF THE ALTRUISTIC DIMENSION OF CSCL CHATS

Summary/Abstract: Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) provides the possibility of education through interaction and social construction of knowledge using information technology, and takes advantage of these tools to allow learners to participate and have an educational interaction within a virtual environment. Chat is one of the most effective tools in CSCL due to its availability and ease of use by learners. It is also one of the most important ways to help in the educational debates, as well as the possibility to exchange and share ideas at any time and at any place. This paper presents a model that is able to semi-automatically analyze the content of the chat considering the altruistic dimension and, its reverse, selfishness. The approach is building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism theory and Stefan Trausan-Matu’s polyphonic model in order to measure collaboration starting from the altruistic or selfish interactions among the important threads discussed in the chat. Therefore, the model provides analytical results and numerical indicators of the degree of altruism for each student’s utterances, which measures individual participations and the extent of his/her contribution in the discussion of educational topics that were raised. Accordingly, the inferred altruistic dimension of the conversation is computed by the ratio of the number of utterances referring to the threads of the other students and the number of utterances a student is referring to its own thread.

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