Thesis: Analyzing Text Complexity and Timeline Evolution

On next Monday, the 26th of September, I will be in the PhD Thesis defence committee of Lucia Larise Stavarache. She designed “BlogCrawl” on top of ReaderBench, which allows to automatically harvest forums and chats, to be in turn analyzed by ReaderBench in terms of knowledge building and participation. Below is an excerpt of her thesis.

The approach underneath this thesis explores and integrates advanced Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Natural Language Processing techniques and Learning Communities research in a consolidated view of how knowledge emerges from supervised and alternative educational environments. Furthermore, extending the dimensional space of analysis through time, topics and sentiments, this thesis presents a multi-dimensional analysis on the evolution of learning communities. Going one step further, the findings resulted are then crossed analyzed from a tutor student relationship in order to fill the current gaps and converge to a collaborative educational approaches inspired by the work of Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1981) Vykostki (Vygotsky, 1978), Scardamalia (Scardamalia, 2002) and Stahl (Stahl, Koschmann, & Suthers, 2006).
The committee is composed of Nic Nistor, Florin Radulescu, Stefan Trausan-Matu (supervisor), and myself.