Discourse, Computation and

Context – Sociocultural DCLA Revisited

CC-BY-NC http://xkcd.com/1085/

Simon Knight @sjgknighthttp://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/

Karen Littletonhttp://www.open.ac.uk/education-and-languages/main/people/k.s.littleton

Acknowledgements/References

This talk is based on:Knight, S, and Littleton, K. “Discourse, Computation and Context – Sociocultural DCLA Revisited.” In 1st International Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics. Leuven, Belgium, 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/36640/

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers, my supervisors Simon and Karen, Yulan He and Rebecca Ferguson for helpful comments and conversations.

Context in context

1. Research around discourse for learning2. Particular emphasis on context3. Current work in DCLA4. Remaining challenge5. Moving forward

Discourse for learningsupporting individuals’ subject

learningTrack subject language

supporting psychological development – the development of oral language and reasoning

skills

Track argument behaviours, structures, and language

promoting whole class and small group understanding or

commonality

Track social interaction

enabling sharing of ideas that can be improved together (both whole

class and small group)…

Track co-constructive artefact development

Context in learning discourse

Common Knowledge• Shared Perspective• Built through discourse and joint action• It both constitutes a context, and is a dynamic

facet of context

Temporal ContextMercer, Neil (2008) “The Seeds of Time: Why Classroom Dialogue Needs a Temporal Analysis.”

• Education is not a series of discrete events• Dialogue mediates this long term process• Yet this aspect is not well theorised or

empirically studied

Common Knowledge

• Dialogue as a representation of context• Dialogue as a dynamic co-constructed context

Background Dynamic

Historic Fluid

Based in communities of practice

Built on co-construction within groups

Context in learning discourseExploratory Talk and Accountable Talk• Critical constructive

engagement• Justifications given• Active participation• Reasoning is visible, and talk

is accountable – participants Interthink

E.g. of exploratory talk

A: OK (reads) so is she a good role model, and why?A: Yeah I think she isB: Wait though, we have to say why, why is she a good role model?A: Hm, she’s a good role model because she helped people…B: ….she helped them to get better A: Yeah, and she helped them in like, a new way?B: Right, she started a new method

DCLAsupporting individuals’ subject learning Subject

vocabulary use

supporting psychological development – the development of oral language and reasoning

skills

Rhetorical marker use

promoting whole class and small group understanding or commonality

Social Network Analysis

enabling sharing of ideas that can be improved together (both whole class and small group)…

Temporally driven discourse

analysis

What do we want?

• Domain general analytics• For peer talk rather than peer/teacher or

peer/conversation agent• With a focus on common knowledge, and

exploratory talk – related to positive outcomes

Combining DCLA

Education is interested in progress – getting from here to there. Methods can be combined to:1. identify the apt-concepts for any particular

discourse (row 1)2. understand the network of intercolutors and

their contributions – conceptual & rhetorical interthinking resources (rows 2 and 3)

3. and understanding how these discourses are related across time and location (row 4)

The Challenge for context…

• Moving beyond understanding where someone else is

• To understanding how they got there too (and who they travelled with)

• And the (joint) artefacts they created, left behind, and plan to create

What is happening v. what is being done

E.g. of exploratory talk

A: OK (reads) so is she a good role model, and why?A: Yeah I think she isB: Wait though, we have to say why, why is she a good role model?A: Hm, she’s a good role model because she helped people…B: ….she helped them to get better A: Yeah, and she helped them in like, a new way?B: Right, she started a new method

Disambiguation - A ‘basic’ challenge in DCLA

Example problems in DCLA & Education

• “Context is a problem, isn’t it?” Rhetoric and anaphora are linguistic problems (as are speech acts such as ‘can you pass the salt?’)

• “Stop that!” “is that right?” spoken by a child or teacher is rather different

• “What were the key medical developments?” Asked at start/end of lesson, or of different students

• “The wiglywoo” Words (or non-words) take on new meanings through on going dialogue

• “should think about x” Can be an imperative, a hypothesis, a question/suggestion, etc.

Documents v. Conversations

• Documents – relatively stable snapshots of distribution of topics

• Conversations unfold, and topics are renegotiated

Thus Introne and Drescher:• Analyse sequences of replies to understand word

clusters, changes, merges, splits to model co-occurrence as opposed to modelling based on dictionaries or other corpora

Methods as Context

The data we train on, and the processes we use have an impact on classifications and how we can treat them

• Training sets require human coders – their methods are an aspect of context

• Document splitting which treats each turn as a document may gloss temporal aspects of context

• Smoothing across turns may rectify this (cf current evidence)

• Other methods for temporal analysis

Methods as Context

• Topic modelling for knowledge flow (and cohesive ties) (domain, and possibly social network specific) – Transactivity

• Plus exploratory talk markers (domain-general)

Discourse as Context

Discourse:1. exists within a particular context and

mediates it, and2. creates context, as a dynamic, collaborative,

discursive property.

You Are Here

Your Route/ landscape

Going forward (with…)

Parallels in Pragmatic Web?

Move from:1. syntax (logical forms and symbolic structures) 2. semantics (meaning of symbols) – preoccupation

with standardisation based on ontologies3. pragmatics address the evolving contexts and

practices of creating, using, and developing epistemic artifacts.

Language in action: The shift “from…language as a tool of representing the world to its view as a means of interacting with the world.” [22:39]Context, language in action, community networks

A note of caution

• DCLA has novel potential for new assessment practices

• However, we should tread cautiously…“in developing tools with limited – but perhaps unstated – views on the nature of language use for learning”

• Once we can detect – how do we support? (offline work)

Thank you for listening

@sjgknightsjgknight@gmail.comhttp://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/