Timeline-based analysis of collaborative knowledge practices within a virtual environment

Collaborative analysis and reflection on knowledge practices is a central element of the Trialogical Learning Approach as it is supposed to be a driving force in processes of practice transformation and knowledge creation. The exploitation of historical logging data holds promise to provide a great deal of information about group activities without requiring additional efforts for recording of events by the users. Building on the Trialogical Learning Approach as well as related work in the fields of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and Information Visualization, this paper suggests high-level requirements for analytic tools in support of practice transformation and introduces an application called Timeline-Based Analyzer (TLBA) that was designed and developed in response to these requirements. The usability of this solution has been tested through a first iteration of several practical experiments and case studies. One of them is described in this paper and illustrates how this tool can be used to support collaborative analysis and reflection. The results of these evaluations have been used for continued improvement of the TLBA in order to provide a stable and intuitive tool. -- Knowledge practices ; collaborative system ; timeline-based visualization ; patterns