Teachers' support using interaction analysis and visualization tools in educational group blogging

Blogging is quite popular and group blogging has interesting potential for collaborative learning. This paper investigates the possibility of implementing Interaction Analysis techniques in educational group-blogging systems, as a tool for supporting teachers especially for engineering education. The main objective of the pilot study is to provide evidence that teachers could be facilitated, in the process of evaluating and assessing students' interaction and participation, through an Interaction Analysis plugin developed for the WordPress blogging platform. Overall, preliminary findings indicate that the prototype WordPress plugin and its integrated Interaction Analysis indicators, described in this paper, can significantly assist teachers in evaluating collaborative learning activities under the scope of engineering education.