Visualizing Learning Activities in Social Network

Abstract

Proliferation of social networks and its use in education and higher learning have become an interesting topic. In order to accommodate diverse student cohorts in the age of massification of education market, this approach has become attractive. Recent advances in learning analytics and data visualization further proved to be useful in encouraging collaborative learning. On the other hand, information of social networks can be too complex to visualize often overloading users with too much possibly unwanted information. The question is what to show and what not to show when we visualize social relationships of users. In this paper, we propose a new visualization model called learning space and develop a method for visualizing learning activities on social network in a 3D virtual learning space. We evaluate the method using questionnaires to see whether visualization of social relations of learning will improve the learning in the following ways or not: make it more fun, make it easier, motivate more. The result shows that our method of visualization of learning activities in social network made learning more fun and easier. The result also shows that it helps student engage and motivate on the subjects.