SNAPP: a bird's-eye view of temporal participant interaction

Abstract

The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) tool was developed to provide instructors with the capacity to visualise the evolution of participant relationships within discussions forums. Providing forum facilitators with access to these forms of data visualisations and social network metrics in 'real-time', allows emergent interaction patterns to be analysed and interventions to be undertaken as required. SNAPP essentially serves as an interaction diagnostic tool that assists in bringing the affordances of 'real-time' social network analysis to fruition. This paper details the functional features included in SNAPP 2.0 and how they relate to learning activity intent and participant monitoring. SNAPP 2.0 includes the ability to view the evolution of participant interaction over time and annotate key events that occur along this timeline. This feature is useful in terms of monitoring network evolution and evaluating the impact of intervention strategies on student engagement and connectivity. SNAPP currently supports discussion forums found in popular commercial and open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Moodle and works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.