View article

Starting from the socio-constructivist concepts of (virtual) community of practice (vCoP) and internet-based argumentative open-ended learning environments, this study proposes and validates two tools for automated dialogue assessment, ReaderBench and Important Moments, developed on the ground of the polyphonic social knowledge building model. The analyzed corpus was the dialogue produced by an academic vCoP with N = 179 community members in 23 months, and consisting of 3685 interventions in 292 text-based discussion threads. The analysis results uncovered significant differences in the discussion threads produced by central and peripheral participants, such that central participants produced more interventions with higher collaborative dialogue quality, and the discussion threads they initiated were longer and involved a larger number of participants. Moreover, based on the automated …