I'm currently working on a project involving online discussions and their effective usage in educational institutions. Together with Dr. William Gibbs (Project Director), we're trying to develop a system that gives an instructor or a forum moderator the ability to easily recognize patterns and direction, in which a particular discussion is going. The system will find and analyze threads of messages and then give a report to the instructor/moderator with a detailed analysis of those messages. Based on the report, the instructor will see where the discussion is going (argument, statement, counter-argument, etc.) and possibly direct where it is intended to go.

The system will be using a custom built AI engine to analyze and categorize messages. Then, using a web interface the system will produce "maps" of those messages for easier visualization of what is going on. We will be using different models of those maps to suit various needs.

Right now, we're in early stages of getting the specifications for the AI engine done. I developed a simple web application that is using PHP to parse text files containing messages from WebCT forums and then using Flash Actionscript, producing a map of those messages. Below is a link to the live site where the application is located.

MTRDS v0.4

We have recently published a paper in the Journal of Educational Technology and Society that very roughly discusses an introduction to our research topic. The paper can be found on their website or by following the links below.

[ Download from Mirror 1] [PDF, 348KB]
[ Download from Mirror 2] [PDF, 348KB]