Unraveling idea development in discourse trajectories

Abstract

With the present paper we want to shed light onto an issue that is central within the knowledge building theory but only little studied – the development of ideas in collaborative learning discourse. Starting from the construction of a network of explicit and implicit relations between ideas, we apply a scientometric method to tackle the temporality of collaborative processes based on the structure of successive ideas. The resulting discourse trajectories are shown to give a holistic and also a detailed view on how knowledge advances when their interpretation is combined with a qualitative analysis of the content of the ideas and their relations. The weighted relevance of relations between ideas enables the identification of sub-topics in the discourse, important ideas, and influence or uptake events.